Sundance Review: Everybody Wants to Play With Domhnall Gleeson in 'The Incomer'

People are great, don’t get me wrong—we all hopefully have a few that we’ve come to appreciate over the course of our lives. And yet the fantasy of finding a faraway island and living out our days unencumbered by the world—its politics, its horrors, its people—trundles on generation after generation, like a genome passed from parent to child. Writer-director Louis Paxton’s The Incomer (which just premiered at Sundance) is at its lovely, funny heart a fantasy about finding happy solitude together. Making our own families on our own terms, and finding the right place along the rope in the tug-of-war between loneliness and fellowship. A balance must be struck, and The Incomer tumbles onto the sweetest of spots, a hawk-eyed gymnast toe planted on its perfect ten.

Domhnall Gleeson (who previously went into natural isolation only to find robot hell and a dancing Oscar Isaac there) here stars as Daniel, an office drone in a small city in Scotland who always stands about five feet away from his co-workers’ camaraderie, awkwardly smiling along. He’s an odd bird, you might say. Lonely and day-dreaming; while the rest laugh and be merry he’s a step off the beat.

Daniel works for the government—specifically as a “land coordinator” in a small bureau that oversees the use and mis-use of public lands. Exciting stuff, in other words! But one day his boss Roz (Michelle Gomez) comes to him with a proper exciting job that she thinks might be for him (i.e. nobody else is able to do it)—there are some people living on a remote island off the coast and the government needs them to go so the place can be properly turned into a protected bird sanctuary. It’ll be Daniel’s job to go there and find these island folks and to let them know that their relocation is non-negotiable and imminent. What could possibly go wrong, right?

At least the numbers aren’t too against him since the people who live on the island are only two—a sister and brother named Isla and Sandy, played by Gayle Rankin (G.L.O.W.) and Grant O’Rourke (Outlander). They moved there as the littlest of children and their parents have both since died—Paxton gives us his history of the island in a delightful little animated sequence, and the film’s decorated by such bespoke flourishes all about.

Anyway, as you can imagine, Isla and Sandy have grown attached to the place since it’s really the only place they’ve ever known. It’s home. And also their father was a bit off his rocker, in thrall to the idea of a hermetic life for them all, so he taught and trained them like warriors to brutally attack any diabolical “incomers.” Mainland-folk will only want to ruin their exquisite and peaceful way of life, he drilled into them well enough that the two still go about their father’s routines daily long after his death.

The perfect situation for incommunicative Daniel to get dropped onto the shore of, then. And sure enough, it doesn’t take long before he’s good and conked on the head. The siblings bicker about what to do with him, but before he’s turned into bird-food, Isla and Sandy do find themselves fascinated—they’ve created all sorts of myths and fairy tales about how the world works, and here all of a sudden is an orange-haired siren singing them songs of the strange across the water.

Isla is extremely stand-offish, but Sandy, a goofily enthusiastic teenager in mind and middle-aged bearded bear-man in body, is immediately taken with Daniel. And in more than one way—The Incomer might only be a love triangle from Sandy’s point of view, but the confusing hormonal rush that both of the thirty-something siblings find themselves awash in upon meeting their first Adult Man is ultimately very funny and very sweet. After all, “Maybe I don’t love him, I just want to look at his bum,” is clearly the world’s most relatable sentiment.

For his part Daniel also begins to see and understand the appeal of this little windy patch of secluded paradise—and when the siblings ask him to explain what’s so great about where he’s coming from and why they should want to go there, he’s mostly at a loss. (Avocados do figure in well, though.) Unfortunately, Daniel also knows there’s a down-vested bureaucratic cavalry coming in shortly to whisk them all away, whether they want it or not. Still, why not learn these fantastic and strange customs while one can, before the outside inevitably spoils everything? There is an old magic there, among the many gulls.

And so, finally, Daniel finds himself invited to the party. But he’s still got life’s most important lesson to learn—that the only thing better than being invited to the party is being invited to the party and being able to get out of going. The Incomer is a darling treatise on the push-pull of wanting to be a part of the world but only so much, and only in the way we want to. How a big part of being an adult is discovering the right balance for ourselves. But with others. Even shrieking banshee women covered in feathers who talk to suicidal fish-men in the sea. Even them!