On paper, Louis Paxton’s The Incomer has a creepy setup. Siblings Isla and Sandy (Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke) are the remaining stewards of a remote Scottish island famous for seagulls and not much else. Daniel (Domnhall Gleeson), a land recovery department employee, is sent to clear Isla and Sandy off the island peaceably if possible, or by force if necessary. Add in the plotline involving John Hannah’s trickster merman attempting to lure one of the siblings to drown themselves in sacrifice to the island and you might expect the film to make a complementary double feature with Ari Aster’s Midsommar.
In execution, though, The Incomer leans more in the direction of a whimsical folk tale than a grim horror freak-out. Isla and Sandy live, by most measures, a fairly peaceful existence on the island, but part of their day-to-day life is spent training in combat, ready to bash in the heads of intruders to their territory. So, when Daniel shows up armed with nothing but a clipboard, he’s quickly hogtied while the siblings decide how best to dispatch him, only for his tales about life on the mainland to enthrall Isla and Sandy just enough to save his skin minute to minute.
Stories about an outsider slowly going native as they realize that the indigenous peoples’ ways are superior to Western life are nothing new, but The Incomer is less a story about gentrification than it is one about Daniel and the siblings’ desperate need for long-lost community. Isla and Sandy keep their oral history alive through folk stories and hold true to their people’s traditions, highlighted by some wonderful practical effects and animation sequences, but these things do little to counteract the profound loneliness at the center of the film, of two people tasked to be caretakers of an entire ancient tradition since youth, who have never known anything else.
The Incomer is about being isolated for so long that you forget how to want things, to the point that when desire actually shows itself, it can’t help but manifest malformed. That’d make for a pretty heavy viewing experience if the film wasn’t also extremely funny, taking all the oddball aspects of the siblings’ existence—mostly centered around seagull rituals—and finding the delightful cartoonish absurdity in it. The tone is by and large balanced just right, highlighting the ridiculousness while still respecting what the island’s traditions mean to the siblings.
The Incomer gives rather short shrift to Daniel’s evolution as a nerd who empathizes with Isla and Sandy due to their shared outsider status, and Emun Elliott’s less-gentle land recovery agent coming to the island like he’s Solid Snake almost veers things to a level of insanity that can feel incongruous with the rest of the film. However, the whole thing is held aloft by Rankin and O’Rourke committing in full to the arrested development of their characters, gleefully shifting between childlike curiosity, feral aggression, and simple joy throughout.
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