SXSW Auteur Award Goes to Kuhn & Stratton-Twine's 'Pincer Point'
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- "The Peril at Pincer Point" premiered in the Visions strand of this year's SXSW program, where it received the Neon-sponsored Auteur Award, per Variety's review.
- Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine's 83-minute black-and-white feature follows Jim (Jack Redmayne), a London sound designer dispatched by tyrannical B-movie auteur P.W. Griffin (Os Leanse) to remote Pincer Point to record a sound mix Griffin calls "unprecedented in film history."
- Noah Stratton-Twine, who also edited and composed the film, previously made his solo feature debut with last year's comedy "Two Big Feet"; for Kuhn, this is a first feature, though both have directed multiple shorts.
- DP Murray Zev Cohen's monochrome compositions are "precisely distressed to evoke bygone schools of low-budget cinema," while sound designers Joseph Field Eccles and Nick Smyth layer "chaos of musical fragments and creaking sonic whatsits" into the mix.
- Stratton-Twine also appears on screen as the missing local woman's slacker brother, and much of the dialogue with Redmayne was improvised in a "shaggy" style.
- The film draws on influences ranging from Powell and Pressburger to Mark Jenkin and Peter Strickland, though Variety cautions it may be "too eccentric a prospect for many distributors" while having "the particular streak of inspired madness on which cult followings can be built."
Why it matters: The SXSW Auteur Award and the festival-circuit buzz Variety identifies suggest Kuhn and Stratton-Twine have built a genuinely distinctive microbudget voice — but the reviewer's warning that the film may be "too eccentric" for most distributors means its future likely depends on cult-word-of-mouth rather than wide release, a familiar make-or-break path for formally adventurous debuts.
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