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Every so often a film comes along that sounds utterly ridiculous on paper, shouldn’t work by any conventional calculation, and somehow wins you over precisely because it refuses to apologize for how strange it is.\u00a0\u00a0THE INCOMER is one of those films.<\/p>\n
The narrative feature directorial debut of writer\/director Louis Paxton, THE INCOMER is quirky, darkly humorous, visually beautiful, occasionally unsettling and ultimately disarmingly sweet. Filled with Scottish folklore, mythical creatures, gulls, wizards, sibling warfare and some very questionable methods of welcoming visitors, it succeeds because Paxton understands one fundamental rule:\u00a0\u00a0Play everything straight.<\/p>\n
Living alone on the fictional Auke Island are brother and sister Sandy and Isla, played by Grant O’Rourke and Gayle Rankin. For more than 30 years, the two have existed virtually apart from the rest of the world, immersed in the folklore and stories handed down by their father and convinced that they are descended from gulls. Isla talks to mythical Thin Men inhabiting the surrounding waters. Sandy knows little of the world beyond what his sister has taught him. And anyone attempting to set foot on their island from the mainland is regarded with immediate suspicion.\u00a0\u00a0They are an “Incomer.”<\/p>\n
Unfortunately for Daniel, marvelously played by Domhnall Gleeson, he is about to become one.<\/p>\n
A socially awkward worker-bee who prefers not dealing with people face-to-face, Daniel works for the mainland company managing the island. When nasty boss lady Roz sends him to evict Isla and Sandy, he arrives wearing a bright red-and-yellow jacket that visually announces his intrusion before he has barely said a word.<\/p>\n
Isla and Sandy respond appropriately.<\/p>\n
They put on handmade bird costumes, throw a rock at his head and knock him unconscious.<\/p>\n
Welcome to Auke Island.<\/p>\n
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What follows could easily have become an exercise in forced eccentricity. In lesser hands, Isla and Sandy might have been reduced to caricatures while Daniel served as the normal outsider through whom we could laugh at the weird island people.<\/p>\n
Paxton is much smarter than that.<\/p>\n
There really isn’t a \u201cnormal\u201d person among them.<\/p>\n
O’Rourke is an absolute delight as Sandy, imbuing him with wide-eyed wonder and childlike innocence without ever infantilizing the character or playing him for ridicule. Having spent more than three decades almost exclusively in the company of his sister, Sandy has an arrested quality to his social and emotional development, but O’Rourke makes his curiosity genuine, his enthusiasm infectious and his innocence enormously endearing. When something\u2014or someone\u2014new enters his world, we can almost see that world expanding behind his eyes.<\/p>\n
Rankin has the more complicated emotional tightrope to walk as Isla and does so beautifully. Stoic, stern and authoritative, Isla has assumed responsibility not only for caring for her thirty-something brother but for protecting their home, their way of life and the legacy handed down to them by their father. Much of that protectiveness operates from a place of fear, something she has inevitably imprinted upon Sandy, but Rankin gives Isla strength rather than fragility.<\/p>\n
This is a woman who knows her world.\u00a0\u00a0She knows its rules.\u00a0\u00a0She knows its stories.\u00a0\u00a0And she intends to protect all of them.<\/p>\n
Until something happens for which no inherited folklore has prepared her.\u00a0\u00a0Her heart flutters.<\/p>\n
Watching Isla tentatively confront romantic feelings for perhaps the first time in her life is both hilarious and unexpectedly touching. In one of the film’s sweetest sequences, she retreats to her shed and consults old women’s magazines to determine what makeup should look like and how a woman should wear her hair. She has carefully saved her mother’s old cosmetics, and out comes the lipstick. Her hair is done. Flowers are added. A dress appears.\u00a0\u00a0This, Isla has apparently concluded, is what women do when romance arrives.<\/p>\n
Rankin never plays the moment for a gag.\u00a0\u00a0That’s precisely why it’s so funny.\u00a0\u00a0And so lovely.<\/p>\n
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Gleeson’s Daniel is the perfect catalyst for all of this because he is every bit as socially ill-equipped as the people he has been sent to evict. He may come from the mainland, but that doesn’t make him socially sophisticated. Daniel lives surrounded by civilization and people yet remains profoundly alone.<\/p>\n
And therein lies the beautiful contradiction at the heart of THE INCOMER.<\/p>\n
Isla and Sandy are geographically isolated, but they have each other.<\/p>\n
Daniel is surrounded by people, but he is alone.<\/p>\n
The more time these three spend together, the less different they become.<\/p>\n
Friendship begins to emerge. Sandy is thrilled to discover another human being beyond his sister, at least until he realizes that having a new friend might mean having to share him. Isla discovers feelings she doesn’t entirely understand. Daniel discovers companionship in perhaps the last place he would ever have thought to look for it.<\/p>\n
And when Isla and Sandy lack the emotional vocabulary necessary to negotiate their changing relationship, there is always the traditional sibling method.<\/p>\n
Beat on each other.<\/p>\n
There is a considerable amount of physical sibling diplomacy on Auke Island.<\/p>\n
But even that works because Rankin and O’Rourke understand the rhythms of two people who have spent decades together with virtually nobody else entering their emotional ecosystem. Daniel doesn’t merely arrive on their island. He changes the dynamic between them.<\/p>\n
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Storytelling becomes one of the loveliest expressions of that growing connection.<\/p>\n
Throughout the film, Isla sits in her mother’s old chair before a roaring fire, Sandy cross-legged and wide-eyed on the floor at her feet, as she recounts the folklore passed down through their family.<\/p>\n
Paxton brings those stories to life through utterly charming pen-and-ink and watercolor animation.\u00a0\u00a0Gulls soar across the sky.\u00a0\u00a0Thin Men with faces that look lilke seals inhabit the sea.<\/p>\n
The animation doesn’t merely decorate Isla’s stories. It opens a window into the mythology that has shaped these siblings’ understanding of themselves and their world. Intriguingly, it can even show us things Isla cannot see when she encounters one of these creatures herself, expanding the folklore beyond the boundaries of her own experience.<\/p>\n
And the tales aren’t always benign.<\/p>\n
The Thin Man who visits Isla attempts to entice her toward the sea, lending the mythology a darkness that sits comfortably alongside the film’s more playful qualities.<\/p>\n
Then Daniel gets in on the storytelling.<\/p>\n
It turns out that Daniel likes wizards.<\/p>\n
A lot.<\/p>\n
Sitting with Isla and Sandy, he spins a tale involving a man with magic who must battle evil people from the assessor’s office. The fact that his supposedly original creation bears a rather suspicious resemblance to THE LORD OF THE RINGS<\/em> does not escape Isla.<\/p>\n She accuses him of not making it up.\u00a0\u00a0Daniel insists that he did.\u00a0\u00a0Of course he did.<\/p>\n It’s a very funny exchange, but also another small indication of how much alike these supposedly incompatible people really are.<\/p>\n Isla has Thin Men.<\/p>\n Daniel has wizards.<\/p>\n Sandy is delighted by both.<\/p>\n Stories are simply another language through which they find one another.<\/p>\n Visually, cinematographer Patrick Golan gives THE INCOMER a beauty that never advertises the film as comedy. Working with Paxton, Golan embraces the natural colors and textures of the landscape\u2014the purples of heather, earthy bogs, greens, lichen and rich plant life\u2014while interiors take on distressed sage and warm wood tones.<\/p>\n With Isla and Sandy living without electricity, natural light becomes essential. Daylight, candlelight, oil lamps and the warm glow of fire create images that feel organic to their existence rather than artificially imposed upon it.<\/p>\n Those bedtime scenes are particularly beautiful.<\/p>\n Fire dances behind Isla as she sits in her mother’s chair. Sandy remains on the floor below, cross-legged and rapt. The physical composition alone tells us almost everything we need to know about these two. Isla has inherited the position of storyteller, protector and keeper of family mythology. Sandy remains the wide-eyed recipient of those stories, still occupying in some ways the emotional position of the boy who first heard them.<\/p>\n Against this earthy visual world, the mainland arrives almost like an alien presence.<\/p>\n Colors become louder.<\/p>\n Daniel’s red-and-yellow jacket screams against the landscape. The boat brings another burst of emergency red. Even an unexpectedly modern red object becomes hilariously conspicuous precisely because it looks as though it has landed from another planet.<\/p>\n Paxton and Golan extend the contrast into composition. The island is given depth, with nature, buildings and plant life often occupying the foreground, while the mainland becomes more regimented, with straight lines and characters framed square-on.<\/p>\n It is visual storytelling that supports the film’s central divide without ever calling attention to itself.<\/p>\n Just as importantly, Golan never photographs the comedy as comedy.<\/p>\n That straight-faced approach is essential.\u00a0 Paxton understands that absurdity becomes funnier when everyone involved believes completely in what is happening. Rankin, O’Rourke and Gleeson never go searching for laughs, and neither does the camera.\u00a0\u00a0The humor simply emerges.\u00a0\u00a0So does the heart.<\/p>\n Editor Brian Phillip Davis has the equally difficult task of maintaining that balance after the cameras stop rolling.<\/p>\n THE INCOMER moves comfortably between comedy, tenderness and imagery coded much more closely to horror. A laugh can grow out of tension. A sweet moment can suddenly become unsettling. A scare can hover just long enough before Paxton releases the pressure through something funny.<\/p>\n Davis finds those beats beautifully.<\/p>\n One particularly lovely passage involving Daniel teaching Isla to swim begins with almost romantic sweetness before shifting toward something much darker. The transition works because THE INCOMER has never treated horror and comedy as incompatible languages. Both depend upon anticipation.\u00a0\u00a0Both depend upon timing.\u00a0\u00a0Both depend upon tension and release.<\/p>\n Composer Tom Kingston understands that as well.<\/p>\n His score is one of THE INCOMER’s greatest pleasures, drawing upon Scottish folk instrumentation without using those instruments in expected ways. The music can be playful, but much of it is surprisingly foreboding, frequently sounding more like the score for a horror film than a comedy.\u00a0\u00a0That’s exactly what the film needs.<\/p>\n Kingston’s looping instrumentation gives the score its own peculiar identity, while percussion\u2014sometimes as simple as an individual drumbeat\u2014becomes a driving force.\u00a0\u00a0At times it feels almost like the heartbeat of the island itself.<\/p>\n Paxton and Davis also avoided temp music, working instead with material Kingston created specifically for the film during the editing process. That decision pays dividends. Image, rhythm and music feel born from the same strange universe rather than stitched together after the fact.<\/p>\n That cohesion is critical because THE INCOMER is constantly walking tonal tightropes.<\/p>\n Folklore and reality.\u00a0\u00a0Comedy and horror.\u00a0\u00a0Fear and affection.\u00a0\u00a0Island and mainland.\u00a0\u00a0Isolation and companionship.<\/p>\n Yet Paxton never treats those elements as mutually exclusive. They coexist as naturally as gulls in the sky and Thin Men beneath the water.<\/p>\n Most importantly, he never condescends to his characters.<\/p>\n THE INCOMER isn’t about normal people encountering weird people.<\/p>\n It’s about three peculiar, lonely human beings discovering that their differences may not be nearly as significant as they initially believed.<\/p>\n And beneath all the eccentricity, Paxton quietly returns again and again to storytelling.<\/p>\n At first, Isla is the keeper of inherited tales. Sitting in her mother’s chair by firelight, she passes along the stories that have shaped her family, her brother and her understanding of the world.<\/p>\n Daniel brings stories from somewhere else, even if his claims of authorship would probably not survive serious literary scrutiny.<\/p>\n And eventually THE INCOMER allows storytelling itself to evolve.<\/p>\n Paxton makes beautiful use of voice-over as the third act draws to a close, allowing a story to carry us through the film’s final passages and reveal what becomes of these people without sacrificing the almost storybook quality that has surrounded them from the beginning.<\/p>\n And one final image brings the film’s ideas together with exquisite visual simplicity.\u00a0\u00a0Isla.\u00a0\u00a0A desk.\u00a0\u00a0A book.\u00a0 Sunlight streaming through a window.<\/p>\n From firelight to sunlight.\u00a0\u00a0From sitting in her mother’s chair telling inherited stories to finding a place from which she can create her own.\u00a0\u00a0From being defined by folklore to becoming its author.<\/p>\n THE INCOMER may be populated by gulls and Thin Men, bird costumes, wizards and gloriously peculiar people, but beneath all its eccentricity lies something wonderfully universal.<\/p>\n The stories we inherit help make us who we are. They connect us to family, place and the people who came before us.<\/p>\n But they don’t have to determine where our own story ends.<\/p>\n Sometimes we inherit them.\u00a0\u00a0Sometimes we preserve them.<\/p>\n And sometimes, when we’re finally ready, we pick up the pen and write our own.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Written and Directed by Louis Paxton<\/p>\n Cast:\u00a0 Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O’Rourke, Michelle Gomez, John Hannah<\/p>\n by debbie elias, 08\/01\/2026<\/p>\n <\/p>\n THE INCOMER releases in theatres on September 25, 2026.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/behindthelensonline.net\/site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/incomer4.png\")
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