Scottish director Louis Paxton’s debut feature brings together three beautifully weird outsiders in a quirky and endearing story about survival, resistance, and building your own community. Peppered with whimsical humor, heartbreaking realizations, and heartwarming discoveries, The Incomer is surprisingly endearing through and through. But beneath the film’s eccentric surface lies a deep study of loneliness which ultimately proves that true comfort isn’t found in leaving the island to join in the “normal” population, but in the ability of these three distinct outsiders to accept each other’s unique weirdness.
The movie follows two siblings, Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), who have lived in total isolation on a secluded, presumably uninhabited island for 30 years, as they try to defend their home and their life from Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson), a land recovery coordinator sent by the Northeastern Scottish Council to evict and relocate them to the mainland. A rather short all-out war breaks out between the siblings and the government official that ends with Daniel’s capture and surrender.
Being raised by peculiar parents on a peculiar island, Isla and Sandy were taught from an early age that the island must be protected at all costs from mainland people, whom they refer to as “incomers.” After their mother died on the mainland, this “us against the world” mentality was deeply ingrained in them by their father just before his passing, and it’s what has kept them isolated from the outside world for 30 years. This very isolation has forced both siblings to live out their own separate versions of loneliness.
For Isla, loneliness acts as a defense mechanism. Not only has she had to protect the island from unwanted guests, but with their parents dead, she’s also had to protect and nourish her brother throughout their lives. We see this in the way she cooks for them and tells him stories by the fire about the island, the gulls, and the lying incomers. Circumstances forced her to be the adult in a world that ceased to make sense the moment her parents disappeared, leaving her trapped as the sole custodian of a crumbling, myth-steeped, two-person society.
In stark contrast, Sandy, with his sister acting as the adult and his sole protector, suffers from a loneliness that stems from being allowed to remain a child forever. He is naive, almost desperately curious about the world, and wholeheartedly believes everything he hears. However, his isolation harbors a deeper vulnerability that surfaces when he interacts with Daniel, a relationship through which his sexuality finally emerges.
Opposite these two characters, Daniel, who must do his duty to bring them to the mainland and into “civilization,” represents another type of outsider. Even though he lives and works in “normal” society, ironically, he is even more isolated from it than the siblings on the secluded island. His own view of the world and passions keep him separated from others. Nerdy, vegan, fan fiction writer, and a massive fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, he is completely unaccustomed to the face-to-face reality of relocating people. That is, until his boss forces him to travel to the island to evict Isla and Sandy.
Paxton making Daniel’s inner nerd his survival tool is a brilliant narrative shift. As he recognizes the siblings’ obsession with myths and folklore, he adapts the plot of The Lord of the Rings to his bureaucratic life, making it sound as if he’s passing a real, oral history of the mainland. In his version of the story, a version that eventually closes the gap between him and the siblings, the ring becomes an official form that must be destroyed by the paper shredder. His ingenuity shows that their separate lonelinesses can only be cured by common language, even if that language belongs to Middle-Earth.
By tying the film’s surreal, black comedy with the authentic weight of grief and social isolation, Paxton avoids the trap of easy, unearned sentimentality. Backed by the remarkable, grounded performances from Rankin, O’Rourke, and Gleeson, the movie transitions smoothly from a chaotic war of hostility and resistance into a deeply moving tribute to acceptance and found families. It is a rare, triumphant debut that proudly waves its freak flag, proving that you don’t need to conform to the “normal” world to find a place to belong. Sometimes, you just need a few fellow outsiders on a rock in the sea.
