Name: The Incomer
Director: Louis Paxton
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Released: 2026-09-04T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 1 h 42 min
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O'Rourke, Michelle Gomez, John Hannah

A man in a red cagoule and a crooked tie steps off a boat onto a wind-scoured Orkney isle, clutching a clipboard and a government mandate. To almost anyone, Daniel is the least threatening figure imaginable: a mild council worker sent to move two people off a rock. To the two people in question, he is the thing their whole lives have taught them to dread. That inversion is the engine of The Incomer, a Scottish folk comedy that hands Domhnall Gleeson the role of a bureaucratic bogeyman and lets an audience decide who the real outsider is.

The siblings are Isla and Sandy, played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke, who have kept to their island for as long as either can remember. They survive by hunting seabirds, they keep their vanished parents alive through retold stories, they talk to mythic creatures as though the conversation were routine, and they guard their shore against the “Incomers” of local legend. Daniel arrives to uproot them on the mainland’s behalf, and the film watches two ways of seeing the world collide on a strip of wet stone.

The Incomer is the feature debut of writer-director Louis Paxton, who has described it as “heartfelt, odd and absurdly funny” and pointed to Hunt for the Wilderpeople and Step Brothers as touchstones. Those two references tell you the register he is after: a film that plays sincere emotion and broad, deadpan silliness in the same breath, wrapped in the visual language of a folk fairy tale. The island is not quaint set dressing; it is a closed system with its own rules, and the comedy comes from an outsider who keeps trying to apply the mainland’s.

For Gleeson, Daniel is a study in escalating helplessness, a man armed with forms and procedure against people who recognise neither. It is a register the actor has quietly mastered: the decent functionary whose reasonableness curdles into something more desperate the longer nobody agrees to be reasonable back. The title is doing work, too. In rural Scotland an “incomer” is a real and loaded word, the name locals give to outsiders who arrive and start rearranging a place that was doing fine without them. Paxton takes that low-grade social friction and inflates it to myth, until a routine relocation order starts to feel like an invasion.

Around Gleeson, Rankin and O’Rourke, Paxton assembles a deep bench of Scottish and Irish talent. Michelle Gomez turns up as Rose, John Hannah lends his voice and presence to the Finman, the sea-creature that haunts Isla’s visions, and Emun Elliott appears as Calum. Rankin is handed the film’s most demanding note: a woman who is feral and tender at once, and who may be closer to the island’s myths than anyone around her wants to admit.

The production carries a surprising amount of institutional muscle for a first feature. It was backed by the BFI, Screen Scotland, Head Gear Films and Inevitable Pictures, shot across Caithness and the Scottish Highlands, and lensed by the cinematographer Pat Golan. The executive-producer roster raises an eyebrow: the comedian Trevor Noah and the musician Moby are both attached, an unusual pairing for a small island comedy and a sign of how far the project’s pitch travelled.

Underneath the jokes sits a subject Scotland knows well: the slow emptying of its islands, and the bureaucratic machinery that decides a place is no longer viable. The Incomer stages that argument as farce, but it keeps one foot in genuine loss, in the parents who vanished and the stories that are all Isla and Sandy have left of them. The mainland’s idea of help and the islanders’ idea of home cannot both survive the encounter, and the film seems to know it.

It travelled far enough to reach Sundance, where The Incomer premiered in the festival’s NEXT strand and walked away with the NEXT Innovator Award. Early notices have leaned warm, with several critics reaching for The Banshees of Inisherin as a comparison, another story about small islands, wounded men and the violence that hides under whimsy. Universal Pictures and Focus Features are handling the film internationally, with Sumerian Pictures taking North America.

Those comparisons are flattering, and they are also a warning. The quirky, melancholy island comedy is by now a crowded lane, and the mode has a failure state: whimsy that congeals into tweeness, mythic imagery deployed as mood rather than meaning. A trailer can hold a tone for two minutes; a feature has to earn it for the better part of two hours, and an award-winning festival cut has yet to prove it lands for a paying weekend crowd rather than a receptive Park City room. Nor does the premise, on its own, resolve the harder question underneath the gags, whether Isla and Sandy’s isolation is a fairy tale to be protected or a tragedy the film is too charmed by to name. Paxton’s stated influences pull in opposite directions, and how cleanly he fuses Step Brothers with something closer to folk horror is the whole gamble.

What is not in doubt is the craft-forward pedigree and the timing. The Incomer opens in cinemas across the United Kingdom and Ireland on 4 September, with a North American release following on 25 September through Sumerian Pictures. It carries a 12A certificate in the UK, and at 102 minutes it is built to be a brisk theatrical outing rather than a festival endurance test, a small film betting that its strange little island has room for one more visitor.