There’s a slogan that goes around the city that hosts the SXSW Film Festival that’s on T-shirts, posters, and bumper stickers: “Keep Austin Weird.” The three films in this dispatch are doing their part.
Jake Kuhn and Noah Stratton-Twine’s “The Peril at Pincer Point” is aggressively weird, and that’s why it works. It commits to its oddity, revealing its creator as a playful visionary who seems equally inspired by “Eraserhead,” “The Wicker Man,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean,” if they were all directed by Andrew Bujalski. So many films at a festival like SXSW pretend to be quirky and strange but are actually quite predictable and routine; this is not the case with “Pincer Point,” a true oddity that also owes a debt to early British filmmaking. It’s truly not like anything else you’ll see this year.
Jack Redmayne plays Jim Baitte, a sound designer trying to make it big years after his breakthrough on the hit franchise “Frogopolis.” He gets a gig working with an eccentric horror director named P.W. Griffin, who speaks rapturously of the production of his latest project on a remote island, a place filled with legends of pirate captains and magical ladies. He tasks Jim with finding both a sound that will elevate the climax of his film and a woman he remembers from his time on the distant isle. When Jim gets there, he finds out that the damsel in distress is literally missing, but that’s only one of the many unusual things about his predicament. Another one? He can hear the crabs talking like surly pirates.
The irascible crabs are truly only one of several oddities in “Pincer Point,” a movie shot in fuzzy black and white by cinematographer Murray Zev Cohen in a style that gives it the tone of a dream (and I think there’s a legitimate reading of the film that it is actually all a vision of the night). As Jim wanders the eccentric isle, usually carrying his sound recording equipment with him, “Pincer Point” maintains a strong personality from beginning to end, becoming a project that feels, in part, like it’s about the power of moviemaking to weave with legends to become something new. After all, artists, even sound recorders, are the modern version of the pirate sitting around the bonfire telling tall tales of the sea. Kuhn and Stratton-Twine not only get that, they embrace it, making a movie that’s like nothing else at SXSW. In a time when too much looks and sounds the same, this a unique pirate story worth hearing.
Sadly, the other two films in this “weird” dispatch don’t connect their concepts with their execution with the same success. First, there’s John Valley’s “American Dollhouse,” a movie boasting an all-Austin production but that sometimes feels like it takes place in an alternate reality. What should be a taut thriller slides too often into an uncanny valley of behavior that’s not quite recognizably human, people going through the motions for a genre impact. Having said that, the commitment by the two leads is admirable, and there are a couple gnarly kills, but this is the kind of B-movie one expects to see at a more horror-inclusive genre fest than the broad canvas of SXSW. (People would be more forgiving of it at Fantastic Fest than here, for example.)
Hailley Lauren plays a woman who moves back to her childhood home after the death of her mother, getting lost in the memories that can feel trapped by a place from our youth. Her brother seems a bit worried about leaving his hard-drinking sister alone to face her demons, but he has his own life to live. And then the woman notices that the incredibly creepy neighbor (Kelsey Pribilski) is watching her through the window, insistent that she put up the Christmas lights that her mother did every other year. To say that she’s an obsessive neighbor would be an understatement, and she clearly (barely) hides a psychotic violent side. From here, “American Dollhouse” becomes an exercise in the inevitable. As our heroine brings people into her life like a possible boyfriend and old friend come to town, we know they’re merely fodder for the crazy lady next door, although Valley does have a bit of fun figuring out new ways to dispatch hapless visitors.
“American Dollhouse” just doesn’t do enough to distinguish it from the crowd. Back stories for both of the leads are hinted at but underdeveloped because Valley is having too much fun making people bleed. The leads commit fully but Valley the writer often doesn’t give them enough to hold onto, making them dolls in his own under-furnished house.
There’s a similar frustrating shapelessness to Brian Tetsuro Ivie’s “Anima,” another sci-fi fable about “what really matters to the human condition” but delivered with such consistently affectless posturing that it almost aggressively avoids emotional connection. It’s a movie of pregnant pauses and deep considerations masquerading as insight, and one that’s consistently sterile in its presentation. It’s almost as if Ivie sought to make as cold and calculated a film as possible about the often-overheated way death is considered in film. It’s something of an admirable effort that makes for a film that just too rarely feels true.
Sydney Chandler (recently in “Alien: Earth”) plays Beck, a young woman who gets a job in a near-future as a sort of hospice chauffeur. Paul (Takehiro Hira, great in “Rental Family”) is dying, but he’s going through a process that will create a sort of eternal A.I. version of himself for anyone who wants to call or even visit. Imagine if you could contact your deceased loved one again or even play with them on a digital beach. Ivie and co-writer Brev Moss do so little with this idea, making it more of an endpoint for Beck/Paul’s journey than exploring a world in which this was possible. Instead, they turn Beck and Paul’s trip across country for Paul to say goodbye to people he’s wronged through his life into an often-traditional end-of-life movie. Paul gets things off his chest like telling a friend that he slept with his wife while Beck sees her troubled relationship with her father reflected in this new one. Both characters feel like they’re at the whim of the plot, pushed into emotional spaces that the writing and even the performing haven’t earned.
I often come out of films at festivals frustrated but intrigued by what the creators will do next. “Anima” falls into that category. Ivie’s sterile color palette here drove me a little insane, but he clearly has vision that’s greater than a traditional indie dramedy filmmaker. He’s trying to do something here that’s not like the other stuff playing SXSW, and he deserves credit for that effort, even if the result comes up short.
