The Incomer (2026) Review: Gleeson Meets the Fin Man — a Reclusive Scottish Island, a Council Eviction Notice and the Warmest 95% Comedy of the Autumn

Louis Paxton's Sundance debut is a small, funny, Wicker Man-flavoured comedy that critics rate 95% — and a rock to the head is only the start.

Domhnall Gleeson spends the first act of The Incomer getting hit on the head with a rock. That is the movie's whole pitch in one gag: a polite, buttoned-up man from the mainland walks onto a remote Scottish island with an eviction notice, and the two people living there respond the way their father taught them to. Louis Paxton's debut feature, released in US theaters on September 25 by Sumerian Pictures, holds a 95% Tomatometer score from 65 reviews, and it has been one of the quietest, least-promoted crowd-pleasers of the autumn.

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What The Incomer is about

Isla (Gayle Rankin) and her brother Sandy (Grant O'Rourke) have lived alone on Gull Island for roughly thirty years, ever since their parents died. They catch seabirds, follow their late father's rules, and train to repel "incomers" from the mainland. Daniel (Gleeson) is a council land-recovery coordinator sent to relocate them on behalf of his ambitious boss, Ros (Michelle Gomez). Wariness turns into friendship because Daniel, in his own way, is an outsider too, and the film's best running joke is Daniel patiently explaining Wi-Fi and supermarkets to two adults who have never needed either.

Paxton, a Bafta-nominated Scottish short filmmaker, wrote and directed, and the film premiered in the NEXT section at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Screen Daily's Nikki Baughan summed up the tone as a cross between The Ballad of Wallis Island and The Wicker Man: a regional comedy with a current of pathos running underneath. It runs a tight 102 minutes and is rated R.

The performances carry it

The trio at the centre is the reason to buy a ticket. Gleeson plays Daniel as a man whose whole personality is a clipboard, and his dumbfounded reactions are where much of the comedy lives. Rankin is spiky and protective as Isla, a woman whose stubbornness is rooted in grief, and O'Rourke makes Sandy a huggable, arrested-development goofball who hangs on every word Daniel says. TheWrap's Matt Donato called them "a well-oiled and hilarious machine," and the chemistry is the film's biggest asset. Gomez steals her scenes as Ros, and John Hannah commits fully as the Fin Man, a folkloric sea creature in surreal human-seal makeup who haunts Isla's fears.

Craft: the island is a character

The film shot on Orkney and in Highland locations, and it shows. Pat Golan's cinematography frames the characters as small and vulnerable against a huge, unforgiving landscape, Tom Kingston's score is melancholy and elemental, and the production design makes the siblings' home look genuinely lived-in rather than art-directed. For a first feature, the sense of place is unusually confident, and it gives the whimsy something solid to push against.

Where it falls short

It is not a flawless film. Baughan notes that it sometimes strains for whimsy and that the screenplay offers few narrative surprises, and Sandy's arrested development occasionally tips from endearing into juvenile. The heavier thread about grief and hard truths is also largely overshadowed by the comedy, so the emotional payoff lands more softly than the setup promises. The humour is distinctly Scottish and distinctly small-scale, which may limit how far it travels. The film's US box office stood at about $209,000 on Rotten Tomatoes at the time of writing, the footprint of a limited release rather than a flop.

Verdict

Critics are warmer than the box office. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 95%, with audiences at 89%, and Metacritic's 62 shows the reservations come from critics who wanted more bite. Reviewer Mitchell Davey called it "one of the funniest movies of the year" in a 4.5-star review, which is an enthusiastic outlier, but the consensus is clear: a good-natured character study held together by three great comic performances. Our FilmRated score is 79, with an IMDb rating of 7.0 from about 2,700 votes. If Wallis Island-style gentle British comedy is your thing, this is an easy recommendation, and the official trailer below will tell you within a minute whether the tone suits you.