Sundance 2026 Review: THE INCOMER, Welcome Weirdness Dominates This Island Set Comedy

For Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), the troubled siblings at the center of promising writer-director Louis Paxton’s feature-length debut, The Incomer, island life is the only life they’ve ever known. It’s a life that’s left them woefully unprepared for the real world of the “mainland” on the other side of the roiling seas that surround their island home. a terrifying prospect. 

 

Left behind by time, circumstances, and an indifferent universe to fend for themselves on a desolate Scottish island, they’ve developed everything but a healthy relationship. With no access to the mainland, they’ve developed a set of routines and rituals that have allowed them to survive on a resource-poor island. Peat provides fuel for their hearth, and seagulls and fish provide their primary food source.

 

It’s a hardscrabble, subsistence-level existence, but it’s the only one they know. Through stories told by their deceased parents and stories built on those stories, Isla and Sandy believe fin-folk (mer-men and mer-women) also live in the surrounding seas. And to allow surface dwellers to live on the island, every generation must sacrifice one of its own to the sea.

 

And that’s where the not-quite-affable Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson), a mid-level bureaucrat terrified of his own shadow and his power-hungry boss, Roz (Michelle Gomez), comes in: The Scottish Council has ordered the island where Isla and Sandy live to be vacated of two-armed, two-legged inhabitants. It’s an assignment Daniel doesn’t want. As a rule-follower by nature, though, Daniel reluctantly agrees to travel by boat and deliver the not-so-good, terrible news of their upcoming eviction to Isla and Sandy personally.

 

Not surprisingly, they don’t take the news well, subduing an easily overcome Daniel and tying him in their shed. Well aware, however, that Daniel isn’t one of one, but one of many mainlanders, they find themselves at an impasse as to their course of action. Harming Daniel (or worse) won’t do any good since other mainlanders will surely follow, and when they do, they’ll arrive in overwhelming numbers.

 

That dilemma, however, takes an almost immediate backseat to a different, if ultimately related, question: Whether Daniel, as alienated a modern, 21st-living man could be (from himself, from others), will succumb to Isla and Sandy’s oddball charms and join them in a platonic or possibly romantic throuple or reject their explicit their invitation and return to a life he never liked or wanted on the mainland. 

 

Paxton draws comedic complications and off-kilter dialogue from a welcome mix of the weird and the absurd, elements all but guaranteed to alienate a sizable portion of The Incomer’s potential audience. Romantic desire, of course, enters uncomfortably into the conversation, as first Sandy and then Isla find themselves attracted to the first individual they’ve met who isn’t a blood relative. His fanciful storytelling skills don’t hurt either, though they have something of the familiar when he tells them to a rapt audience of two.

 

Anchored by impressively realized turns from the dedicated trio of Gleeson, Rankin, and O’Rourke, each, in turn, perfectly embodying their damaged characters, The Incomer offers more than its share of surface-deep pleasures for audience members willing to embrace Paxton’s singular take on the “stranger on a strange island” premise. While it’s hard to single out any one performer, Rankin shines the brightest, in part due to the Moebius-inspired dialogue Paxton gives her character, and in even larger part due to Rankin’s willingness to take Isla into the darkest recesses of her mind.