Writer-director Louis Paxton’s “The Incomer” is about a brother and sister who’ve been living on the same remote Scottish island where they grew up ever since their parents disappeared three decades ago. Grant O’Rourke is the brother, Sandy. Gayle Rankin is the sister, Isla, who also narrates the movie. Change is coming. What will the siblings do when it arrives?
They eat oysters they harvest from the shore and seagulls they catch with nets. (Sandy is a skilled neck-snapper.) Having lived so long without parental guidance, schooling, or anything resembling a society, Isla and Sandy are just a couple of steps up from being feral. Their development is arrested at the age when their parents went bye-bye. They tussle like kids, but because they’re both adults, it rattles the room. Afterward, they sit by the fire, Sandy cross-legged on the floor, Isla in a r0cking chair. Isla’s visually superior position indicates that she’s the closest thing to a parent that her brother has had, although she wouldn’t win any prizes for maturity herself. When she hears gulls shrieking, she shrieks back.
Into this lovely but forbidding environment comes Daniel, a land recovery coordinator for the Northeastern Scottish Council. Daniel is played by Domnhall Gleason, son of the beloved Brendan, who gave one of his best performances in “The Banshees of Inisherin,” which is also a semi-folktale set on a remote island. Daniel tells the siblings they’re being evicted and have thirty days to leave the island, and if they have any questions, they can email evictions@highland.gov.uk. The siblings stand mute as Daniel speaks. They’re wearing ancient suits of armor. This answers Daniel’s question, “Do you have wi-fi?” Soon after, he’s tied up, and we’re on to the inevitable contest of wills.
The quirky rustic comedy set in or near the British Isles or Ireland has long been a staple of arthouse film programming in the United States, because the stories tend to be funny and quaint and low-stakes. This is another feature in that vein. It’s not reinventing the spurtle (look it up, luv). But it does what it does so well that its charms are hard to resist. There’s even a story-time segment with hand-drawn, black-and-white animation, narrated by Isla. After she’s done, she asks Daniel if he can tell them a “story of the mainland.” His response is a tale you might’ve heard, about a little fellow named Frodo.
Some of the gags stretch credulity even by nearly cartoonish slapstick standards (at first, the siblings think Daniel is a wizard), and from the start, you pretty much know where the story has to go and how it will get there. The quasi-mythical elements give the story a lot of latitude to be goofy. Isla and Sandy speak to mythical creatures, including a Finman (John Hannah) who entreats Isla to get in the water and help herself to a wider variety of food. She’s not interested.
“Do ye not eat gull?” Sandy asks Daniel over dinner, as he mutely watches the siblings strip the bird skeleton on a platter in front of them. “I’m a vegan,” Daniel says. “What’s that?” Sandy asks. Daniel tells them about the Internet, where “you can have anything you want at the touch of a button,” but when Isla presses him to explain how it works, we realize that for most people in the supposedly advanced outside world, it’s another form of magic.
There’s a faintly despondent strain running through the script. Paxton and the actors do just enough with it to make you aware that it exists, but not so much that it overwhelms the comedy. It mainly comes from the contrast between the siblings’ absolute certitude that their way of life is the only way and they love it and would never dream of abandoning it, and the reality, which is: it sucks being trapped on an island with one other person your whole life, eating gull meat and oysters and, we must assume, knitting their own clothes to replace the kid clothes they outgrew? It’s not as if they could pop into a department store. Even if they could, what would they pay with? Thistles and bluebells?
“You both need to leave. I mean, look at you,” Daniel tells them, as Isla glares at him, brandishing a whacking stick. “You’re running about with clubs. You’re wearing rags…Back on the mainland, you wouldn’t have to do any of that. Your lives would be easier. They’d be healthier. Come with me. We’ll set you up with a new house.” Isla’s response is to spit.
All in all, it’s light and fun and always watchable, thanks to the crackling chemistry among the leads and the magnificent scenery (mainly Caithness, a county in the uppermost northeast corner of Scotland) captured by cinematographer Pat Golan. You can almost feel the morning chill and smell the saltwater. You can definitely hear the seagulls. No wonder Isla shrieks at them. They never shut up.
