The Incomer (2026)

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.