The Wicker Man may have given the islands around the U.K. a dark and foreboding rap, but that actually works to the advantage of the two inhabitants of a forlorn island off the Scottish coast, who dabble in spooky stories and costumes to scare away any visitors. Those trespassers, known as Incomers to Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), are not welcome. The sister and brother believe it’s mainlanders’ fault that their island’s population left them and their parents alone. With their parents long gone, the siblings just have each other for company until a shaggy-looking office clerk named Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson)—a low-ranking employee of the Scottish government—stumbles onto their shores, asking if they have Wi-Fi. Not only is he an unwelcome stranger to these parts, he also comes bearing bad news: The siblings will soon have to leave the island they call home. Thus opens Louis Paxton’s strange and wacky fish-out-of-water comedy The Incomer.
The Incomer is charming, light, and silly. Everyone acts a bit over-the-top in an almost slapsticky way, giving way to their characters’ worst impulses. Isla, the protective matriarch of the island, is naturally distrustful of outsiders, and just as ready to fight with them or her larger brother to win arguments. Rankin plays her with a feral intensity, like a scared animal that will bite, hiss, and feel no remorse. Meanwhile, Sandy, a sweet summer child who believes almost everything he’s told and is easily overwhelmed with emotions, acts like a bouncer with a toddler’s temperament. O’Rourke leans into the teddy-bear persona of his otherwise imposing character, but he’s nowhere near as ferocious as Isla. Each sibling has their individual quirks as well as some shared habits that startle their unsuspecting visitor, like their homemade folk-horror costumes, their habit of praying in bird-like caws, and their penchant for screaming at the sea.
Gleeson’s role in the trio is much more disarming. He’s an underappreciated office geek whose desk is decorated with wizard figurines and whose shaggy haircut looks like he’s escaped the Shire. When challenged by Isla upon his arrival, he struggles to explain modern-day things like the internet, and passes off a version of The Lord Of The Rings as his own story. The trusting Sandy is easy to win over, but also much quicker to feeling betrayed when Daniel later tries to escape the siblings. This collides head-on with the arrival of two of Daniel’s colleagues, his boss Roz (Michelle Gomez) and the ridiculously intense Calum (Emun Elliot), who expect an easy eviction process. But the siblings will grant them no such thing—and, however unlikely at first, Daniel finds himself charmed by the islanders and their scrappy way of life, and ends up taking up their cause.
Paxton, making his theatrical feature debut, jumps right into his characters’ culture clash. He plays up the absurdity between the two sides learning from each other—sometimes in charming moments, like Daniel trying to teach Isla to swim, and sometimes for a silly joke, like a running bit where Sandy finds, misunderstands, and desires to own a washed-up sex toy. This is aided by moving away from the drab color palette of island fare like The Third Day; Paxton and cinematographer Patrick Golan create a vividly verdant world that looks inviting, but tonally dark enough for some foreshadowing. Composer Tom Kingston’s equally quirky and bizarre score is a funky blend of discordant sounds, chants that sound as if they were transmitted over the radio, and traditional Scottish folk music, echoing the film’s idiosyncratic characters. But the tension between the mainland and the island is most of what the movie has going for it, and it doesn’t push past that surface-level comedy until near the end, when Daniel tries to get Isla to see that the mainland may not have been responsible for her parents’ deaths.
By that finale, the film gets even looser and sillier (think a climatic struggle with hints of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds), but Paxton’s offbeat journey mostly sustains its lighthearted laughs through the absurdity. Although the twee factor of The Incomer is relatively high, Gleeson and Rankin’s combative standoff makes for a fun pairing, and the filmmaking team builds out the odd island world so that it has its own sense of danger—and maybe even a little magic, in the form of seal-like creature they refer to as “fin men” that drag sacrifices to their watery graves. Despite its ultra-silly trappings, the film has a few serious things to say about bridging the city-rural divide, finding the things we have in common, and sharing what we don’t. Those able to march to The Incomer‘s eccentric beat will find plenty of light, odd comedy, even when the culture clash gets heated.
Director: Louis Paxton
Writer: Louis Paxton
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O’Rourke, Michelle Gomez, Emun Elliot, John Hannah
Release Date: September 25, 2026
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