Sundance ’26: ‘THE INCOMER’ An Oddball Isle Curio Ripe with Laughs

Brother and sister Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke) have been living alone on the isolated, windswept Auk Isle off the coast of Scotland for 30 years. Entirely self-reliant, they spend their days hunting and gathering, swapping feverish tales of mainland threats, and preparing for phantom invaders. This translates to things like netting seagulls to make soup, resisting temptations from the seal-faced Fin-Man who may or may not be imaginary, and whacking each other about the head like a Punch and Judy act. They’re feral in that specific way only children left entirely to their own devices can be, raising each other into wild, loyal delinquents.

Enter Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson), a pencil-pushing bureaucrat sent to oversee their eviction from the island. Unfortunately for Daniel, the siblings have been preparing for this moment their entire lives. His arrival is met not with pleasantries but with a net, a bonk, and immediate imprisonment.

Director Louis Paxton, a Scottish filmmaker whose prior work includes shorts and TV episodes but no major breakout, feels like he’s arrived with this one. Paxton manages heart and humor handily, portraying Auk Isle as a place of harsh reality and strange allure. The terrain is brutal—cold, craggy, unyielding—but it’s also oddly romantic in an end of the Earth type way. You understand why someone might want to disappear here. Bird soup aside.

Gleeson is excellent as the stiff-lipped emissary of bureaucracy, playing the straight man who gradually succumbs to the island’s pull. But it’s O’Rourke’s Sandy, played with hilarious simplicity as a gentle giant/mental midget, who steals his every moment onscreen. He’s sweet and erratic, like if Lennie from Of Mice and Men were raised by puffins and Selkie superstition.

The music slaps. Folksy, fast-paced, and delightfully off-kilter, the score feels like a band of drunk villagers doing a jig around a raging fire. It gives the film a propulsive, homespun energy that complements its anarchic spirit.

The Incomer is funny throughout – dry, rich with physical comedy, and frequently unhinged – but it also sneaks up on you with moments of real heart. The pacing never drags, and the weirdness is measured with enough sincerity to avoid tipping into ridiculous self-indulgence. The rough, hand-drawn animations that pepper the story add further layers of demented island folklore – Selkies, sea-spirits, immigrating villagers.

There’s actual substance under the oddball antics: a sharp critique of the flattening forces of government, the dull throb of imposed civility, and the slow, bureaucratic death of culture. On Auk, life is simple and enjoyable for it, but something eludes Isla and Sandy: connection. For them both, Daniel is their first real encounter with someone new. Their antagonism towards him melts into friendship and possibly romance. The threats of the mainlands remain real but the draw of civilization holds, mostly in the messy, necessity of human connection.

CONCLUSION: A strange little gem powered by plenty of heartfelt laughs and feral charm, ‘The Incomer’ is a hilarious treatise of solitude vs. connection, complete with seal-man mythos, and folkloric bangers, and the glorious madness of being human anywhere on earth.