Once upon a time, two siblings lived on an abandoned Scottish isle, isolated from the modern world and suspicious of all outsiders. The siblings, a brother and sister, believed themselves to be descended from the gulls that peppered the island’s scenic cliffs; they also believed, on some level, that they too were gulls – or, at least, they acted like it, flapping and squawking about.
Debauched fairytales like these loom large over The Incomer, Scottish writer-director Louis Paxton’s odd and aggressively quaint first feature, which asks a high conceptual buy-in of its audience. From the first shots of Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke) caw-caw-ing like birds and beating sacks labeled “incomer” with clubs, Paxton commits to an askew, often alienating angle of humor – quirky, at times juvenile, a touch dark, altogether difficult to settle into for anyone with an aversion to twee.
It does not help that Isla and Sandy, left on the island by their deceased parents years earlier, act more like children than adults, brutish and blunt and stunted in ways more off-putting than endearing. With no other human contact, the two believably live on the border of reality and myth, entertaining themselves with stories – relayed to us in animated pencil sketches, as narrated by Isla – of the gull ancestors and evil selkie-esque creatures that demand human sacrifice. (In a cringy flourish, said selkie also appears as a man in an obvious wetsuit and black contacts, beckoning Isla into the sea).
Equally mythical is the idea that these two siblings have managed entirely on their own on a remote northern island for decades, and have had no human contact nor curiosity to ever visit the mainland, let alone learn of the existence of the internet – which, of course, must be cutely explained to them by Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson), a local councilor sent to evict them by his transparently machiavellian boss (Michelle Gomez). Able to subdue the siblings with his “wizard powers” (a smartphone that freaks them out) and lightly adapted tales like The Lord of the Local Authority, Daniel slowly ingratiates himself into their tiny circle of trust and, like many a mainland conquerer before him, develops some sympathies.
Gleeson, fresh off his starring turn in The Office spin-off The Paper, has honed his milquetoast middle manager shtick to a sharp point; he’s an admirably game foil to the siblings’ rock-pelting insanity. And the collision of feral subsistence living and white-collar apathy does generate some sparks – Sandy, whom O’Rourke plays as a lovably doltish puppy eager for love, takes quickly to Daniel, who handles the schoolboy crush with amusing playfulness. (Tasked with the most off-kilter and absurd gags – hitting his own head with a rock, for one – O’Rourke manages to keep us rooting for the manchild.) Daniel takes to Isla, and their moments of disarmament – when Rankin allows Isla’s overdone defenses and cartoonish scowl to drop – are genuinely sweet. The isle, at times lushly and patiently captured by cinematographer Pat Golan, offers some small wonders.
Unfortunately, those reprieves are too frustratingly few, and too often shoehorned into jarringly sincere revelations on trauma, abandonment, empowerment. Instead The Incomer returns, again and again, to the joke of the islanders’ ignorance, to the point where it almost feels insulting to their intelligence. A generous reading would be that their bewilderment of, say, electric toothbrushes puts the deadening idiocy and disconnections of modern life – Where does our food actually come from? How does the internet work? What about the phones? – in stark relief. But whatever insight there is gets buried in a deluge of quirky bits of self-satisfied weirdness, including a climactic swing toward violence and “revenge of the nerds” territory (complete with a “maybe I AM weird” speech).
Still, one person’s washed-up dildo joke is another’s uproarious gag – this specific concoction of absurdism, sentimentality, childish humor and dark punchlines may have stayed off-key for me, but seemed to strike a chord with others, at least judging from the many guffaws at the screening I attended. Where I was put off by The Incomer’s cutesy hijinks, others may find winsome messages on the fickle magic of human connection and the risks of snap judgment. To those people, I wish a pleasant stay on the isle.
The Incomer is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
