{"id":858113,"date":"2026-09-23T19:30:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T19:30:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/858113\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T19:30:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T19:30:09","slug":"the-incomer-review-domhnall-gleeson-weathers-twee-comedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/858113\/","title":{"rendered":"The Incomer review: Domhnall Gleeson weathers twee comedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Wicker Man<\/a> may have given the islands around the U.K. a dark and foreboding rap, but that actually works to the advantage of the two inhabitants of a forlorn island off the Scottish coast, who dabble in spooky stories and costumes to scare away any visitors. Those trespassers, known as Incomers to Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O\u2019Rourke), are not welcome. The sister and brother believe it\u2019s mainlanders\u2019 fault that their island\u2019s population left them and their parents alone. With their parents long gone, the siblings just have each other for company until a shaggy-looking office clerk named Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson)\u2014a low-ranking employee of the Scottish government\u2014stumbles onto their shores, asking if they have Wi-Fi. Not only is he an unwelcome stranger to these parts, he also comes bearing bad news: The siblings will soon have to leave the island they call home. Thus opens Louis Paxton\u2019s strange and wacky fish-out-of-water comedy The Incomer.<\/p>\n

The Incomer is charming, light, and silly. Everyone acts a bit over-the-top in an almost slapsticky way, giving way to their characters\u2019 worst impulses. Isla, the protective matriarch of the island, is naturally distrustful of outsiders, and just as ready to fight with them or her larger brother to win arguments. Rankin plays her with a feral intensity, like a scared animal that will bite, hiss, and feel no remorse. Meanwhile, Sandy, a sweet summer child who believes almost everything he\u2019s told and is easily overwhelmed with emotions, acts like a bouncer with a toddler\u2019s temperament. O\u2019Rourke leans into the teddy-bear persona of his otherwise imposing character, but he\u2019s nowhere near as ferocious as Isla. Each sibling has their individual quirks as well as some shared habits that startle their unsuspecting visitor, like their homemade folk-horror costumes, their habit of praying in bird-like caws, and their penchant for screaming at the sea.<\/p>\n

Gleeson\u2019s role in the trio is much more disarming. He\u2019s an underappreciated office geek whose desk is decorated with wizard figurines and whose shaggy haircut looks like he\u2019s escaped the Shire. When challenged by Isla upon his arrival, he struggles to explain modern-day things like the internet, and passes off a version of The Lord Of The Rings<\/a> as his own story. The trusting Sandy is easy to win over, but also much quicker to feeling betrayed when Daniel later tries to escape the siblings. This collides head-on with the arrival of two of Daniel\u2019s colleagues, his boss Roz (Michelle Gomez) and the ridiculously intense Calum (Emun Elliot), who expect an easy eviction process. But the siblings will grant them no such thing\u2014and, however unlikely at first, Daniel finds himself charmed by the islanders and their scrappy way of life, and ends up taking up their cause.<\/p>\n

Paxton, making his theatrical feature debut, jumps right into his characters\u2019 culture clash. He plays up the absurdity between the two sides learning from each other\u2014sometimes in charming moments, like Daniel trying to teach Isla to swim, and sometimes for a silly joke, like a running bit where Sandy finds, misunderstands, and desires to own a washed-up sex toy. This is aided by moving away from the drab color palette of island fare like The Third Day; Paxton and cinematographer Patrick Golan create a vividly verdant world that looks inviting, but tonally dark enough for some foreshadowing. Composer Tom Kingston\u2019s equally quirky and bizarre score is a funky blend of discordant sounds, chants that sound as if they were transmitted over the radio, and traditional Scottish folk music, echoing the film\u2019s idiosyncratic characters. But the tension between the mainland and the island is most of what the movie has going for it, and it doesn\u2019t push past that surface-level comedy until near the end, when Daniel tries to get Isla to see that the mainland may not have been responsible for her parents\u2019 deaths.<\/p>\n

By that finale, the film gets even looser and sillier (think a climatic struggle with hints of Alfred Hitchcock\u2019s The Birds), but Paxton\u2019s offbeat journey mostly sustains its lighthearted laughs through the absurdity. Although the twee factor of The Incomer is relatively high, Gleeson and Rankin\u2019s combative standoff makes for a fun pairing, and the filmmaking team builds out the odd island world so that it has its own sense of danger\u2014and maybe even a little magic, in the form of seal-like creature they refer to as \u201cfin men\u201d that drag sacrifices to their watery graves. Despite its ultra-silly trappings, the film has a few serious things to say about bridging the city-rural divide, finding the things we have in common, and sharing what we don\u2019t. Those able to march to The Incomer\u2018s eccentric beat will find plenty of light, odd comedy, even when the culture clash gets heated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Director: Louis Paxton\u00a0
Writer: Louis Paxton\u00a0
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O\u2019Rourke, Michelle Gomez, Emun Elliot, John Hannah\u00a0
Release Date: September 25, 2026 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Wicker Man may have given the islands around the U.K. a dark and foreboding rap, but that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,206],"class_list":["post-858113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}