OVERVIEW
The Incomer is a mix of The Banshees of Inisherin and Pocahontas, with the irreverence and humor of Monty Python. Set on a remote Scottish island, it first introduces us to siblings Isla and Sandy, who live by strict routines and inherited folklore, hunting seabirds and treating outsiders as a threat to the balance of their world. When Daniel, a council worker, arrives as an “incomer” to evict them from the island, he is captured and forced into their rules and rituals, all while wrapped in their warped sense of hospitality.
BACKGROUND
It premiered in Sundance’s NEXT section at the 2026 festival, Sundance’s home for new voices and more experimental, offbeat work, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award. It marks the feature debut of writer-director Louis Paxton, who had mostly worked in short-form and TV up to that point. He spent roughly ten years developing it, aiming for a distinctly Scottish comedy with universal appeal, built around connection versus isolation and resistance to change.
EXECUTION
It is a charming, quirky movie, and it works largely because of the dynamic among its three main characters. A lot of the fun comes from Domhnall Gleeson playing a heightened, more neurotic version of his Ex Machina character. His thin stature suits the role, and his exaggerated facial expressions and physical choices get consistent laughs. It is also nice seeing him in something this sweet again after a run of villain roles.
As effective as Gleeson is, the film really belongs to the islanders. Grant O’Rourke brings a similar wide-eyed naïveté to Tim Key in The Ballad of Wallis Island, while Gayle Rankin plays Isla’s longing with total sincerity, even when she is dressed in a ridiculous bird costume. Together, their commitment makes scenes that should not work, like Daniel narrating The Lord of the Rings to them, land surprisingly well. Rankin, especially, gives the movie its emotional anchor, and the ending hits harder than you expect.
Where it stumbles is when it reaches for broader, more surreal comedy. The fantasy conversations Isla has with the human-seal lean too silly for the film’s emotional scale, and the detours involving Calum and Rose do not really hit the mark. A character like Calum needs to either embrace the silliness or carry more menace. He sits somewhere in between, and those stretches start to feel overlong.
The contrast between the outside world and Isla and Sandy’s way of living is funny for a while, and their shock at Daniel’s perspective is often amusing, but the film does not always follow through on what is most interesting about that setup. It keeps circling the joke of “look how different they are,” yet it rarely digs into those differences in a way that says something sharper about modern-day isolation. Paxton’s thoughts on connection and isolation are present, but they remain in the background, mainly serving to set up the jokes rather than conveying additional meaning.
AFTERTASTE
The Incomer is a cute, funny film that does not push any new thematic or comedic boundaries, but it is consistently entertaining. The three lead performances do most of the heavy lifting, especially Gayle Rankin’s Isla, a character I genuinely wanted more of by the end. I would not have given it the “most innovative” designation, but it might be one of the sweetest.