Scottish islands have long been fertile ground for cinema, but few films have planted a flag quite as strange or as tender as The Incomer. Louis Paxton’s comedy-drama, released in cinemas in early September and now settling into its streaming afterlife, takes us to a windswept Orkney isle where time moves at the pace of the tide and the past is not so much remembered as relived. At its centre are siblings Isla and Sandy, played with weathered conviction by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke, who scratch out an existence by hunting seabirds, spinning the tales of their ancestors around the fire, and keeping watch for the dreaded “Incomers” - outsiders who, in their telling, have a habit of taking rather than giving.
It is a delicate, slightly surreal world, held together by ritual and stubbornness, and Paxton establishes it with real affection. The film’s humour emerges naturally from the islanders’ absolute commitment to their own mythology; they speak of Incomers with the hushed gravity others reserve for weather warnings. So when Daniel - a council worker in a sensible anorak, played by Domhnall Gleeson with an exquisite gift for awkwardness - arrives to uproot them from their homeland, the comedy of manners that follows is as much about clashing cosmologies as it is about bureaucracy. Daniel is not a villain. He is a man with a clipboard, a mandate and absolutely no idea what he has walked into.
Gleeson is the film’s great Trojan horse. Known for finding the humanity in the hapless, he makes Daniel a study in small humiliations and quieter decencies, a man who believes in forms and procedures and finds himself confronted by people for whom the land is not an asset but an ancestor. Rankin, meanwhile, gives Isla a flinty interiority; she is the keeper of the stories, and her suspicion of Daniel slowly, believably, gives way to something more complicated. O’Rourke’s Sandy supplies much of the film’s dry, deadpan pleasure, a man who can deliver a line about seabird stew with the solemnity of a eulogy. Around them, Michelle Gomez oozes wry authority as Roz, while John Hannah lends a mythic weight to Fin Man, a figure who hovers at the edge of the story like a half-remembered legend.
Paxton, working on a small canvas, directs with an eye for the elemental: cliffs, salt spray, firelight against stone walls. The film runs a tight 102 minutes and never overstays its welcome, though its tonal balancing act - broad comedy one moment, genuine elegy the next - is not always seamless. There are stretches where the film seems uncertain whether it wants to laugh at its islanders or mourn with them. It is to the cast’s credit that these shifts feel like weather rather than inconsistency.
The film’s central question is a serious one dressed in comic clothing: what happens when a community’s identity is built on resistance to outsiders, and the outsider turns out to be merely a man doing his job? The Incomer resists easy answers. Daniel is not converted, and the islanders are not defeated; instead, everyone is nudged slightly off their footing, which feels truthful. The film’s streaming arrival seems apt for a story about the tension between preservation and change - here is a movie about being rooted, arriving in a medium built on movement.
A TMDb rating of 7.1 suggests audiences have responded to its odd, warm-hearted brew, and that feels about right for a film that trades bombast for something more durable. It is a modest work, but a distinctive one - a comedy of exile that understands exile can be internal, and that the fiercest defences are often built around stories. In a season crowded with noise, The Incomer is a quiet, salty gust of fresh air.
