While working on an indie creature feature about a giant crab, hapless sound recordist Jim is sent back to Pincer Point to find a missing girl and capture a sound no one has ever heard for the film’s climactic roar. Neither task proves easy on the strange island, where tight-lipped locals whisper of a ghost ship and its pirate captain who claims the souls of young men and women for his crew. Armed with his trusty boom mic, however, Jim proves more than a match for seafaring spectres and overgrown crabs, sending back uncanny recordings that inspire the director to reshape his film around them.
Lovingly handcrafted and absurdly hilarious, The Peril at Pincer Point is a crustaceous curio awash with affection for indie filmmaking. Co-directors Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine push low-budget cinema to its limits, pairing Pythonesque comedy and retro black-and-white B-movie flair with atmospheric sound design that celebrates the film crew’s unsung hero: the man with the boom.
Content Considerations: Flashing lights, themes of death
Supported by
Media Partner
Jack Redmayne, Alyth Ross, Os Leanse, Jason Hogan, Heidi Parsons
UK
2026
English
At VIFF Centre & International Village
At Fifth Ave
Indigenous & Community Access
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Credits & Director
Executive Producer
Igor Engler, Caroline Burton
Producer
Noah Stratton-Twine, Jake Kuhn
Screenwriter
Noah Stratton-Twine, Jake Kuhn
Cinematography
Murray Zev Cohen
Editor
Noah Stratton-Twine
Original Music
Tom Penn
Noah Stratton-Twine
Noah Stratton-Twine is a writer, director, editor, and composer whose work blends sharp character-driven storytelling with a resourceful DIY ethos. His works span a variety of genres, including Peril at Pincer Point — an improvised, Roger Corman–inspired comedy that won the NEON Auteur Award for Uncompromising Visionary at SXSW 2026 — and his upcoming feature The Present Times, a paparazzo tragedy executive produced by Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton’s Dirty Films, Eric Roth, and Brian Kavanaugh-Jones.
Filmography: Two Big Feet (2025)
Jake Kuhn
Jake Kuhn is a writer, producer, director, and recent alumnus of the National Film and Television School, where he directed the Python-esque medieval farce Hand to God (2026). A lover of all cinema, Jake directed his first feature Peril at Pincer Point (2026) — winner of the NEON Auteur Award for Uncompromising Visionary at SXSW 2026 — with Noah Stratton-Twine. He is next set to produce The Present Times for director Stratton-Twine, alongside several other feature-length projects that he will both write and direct independently.
Altered States
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