‘The Incomer’ Review: Domhnall Gleeson in Oddball Scottish Comedy

The British Isles can be treacherously vulnerable to twee overload in movies, though last year’s The Ballad of Wallis Island showed that it can be avoided, remaining a minor-key charmer even while it embraced every oddball eccentricity that writer-stars Tom Basden and Tim Key could concoct. Louis Paxton’s The Incomer is not so resilient. Set on an even more remote island, this one off the northeast coast of Scotland, it centers on orphaned siblings who have grown up in isolation, without the comforts of modern mainland life — in thrall to mythical seagull legends that make this abrasively unfunny comedy strictly for the birds.

The movie’s saving grace is Domhnall Gleeson as Daniel, a gentle-natured mainlander working as a land recovery coordinator for the Northeastern Scottish Council. He’s an awkward outsider in the office, his moral misgivings about foreclosures and evictions, turfing people out of their lifelong homes, leading his careerist boss Roz (Michelle Gomez) to treat him like a bleeding-heart fool. He’s also “a ginger” with eczema, which doesn’t exactly raise his stock.

With Daniel’s empathy perceived as a weakness, Gleeson makes him the ideal mediator to communicate with two people positioned even further out on the margins. Calum (Emun Elliott), the thuggish staffer usually in charge of doorstep evictions, is out of commission due to some legal strife, so Roz sends Daniel in his place to a tiny island where brother and sister Sandy (Grant O’Rourke) and Isla (Gayle Rankin) — on-the-nose names that make them seem like they belong in Bikini Bottom with Spongebob — have lived alone since their parents passed 30 years ago.

Paxton makes clever use of Selina Wagner’s doodling animation to pencil in the island’s ancestral folklore, frequently recounted by bossy Isla to dim bulb Sandy, when she’s not caw-cawing at birds like a witch. The isle belongs to the gulls, and the siblings were taught as children to defend the birds’ sanctuary from “incomers,” bringing with them the decadence and deceit of the mainland. Even so, Isla jealously guards the flotsam that drifts ashore, including a bendy sex toy that they think must be a weapon of some kind. Oh, the hilarity!

The brother and sister sustain themselves by digging up peat bog to burn in an ancient, dilapidated house with no utilities, and hunting seabirds. But it’s a meager existence. “I could go for some whale blubber right now,” says hungry Sandy.

Probably three readers at most will get this reference, but the establishing scenes on the island poked my repressed memory PTSD, hate-watching 1970s British children’s fantasy TV series like Catweazle, a show about a creepy time-traveling wizard that dialed up the whimsy to 11. The movie also brought back those cringe-inducing scenes at the end of another drama set on a windblown Scottish island, The Outrun, in which Saoirse Ronan “conducts” turbulent nature with an invisible baton.

The Incomer follows similar cues. Rankin plays Isla as a shrill, feral version of Gaby Hoffman (no offense to the wonderful Gabs) given to physical violence, while O’Rourke gets to play the sweet, constipated dolt, talking wistfully of the days when his “bottom mess” flowed more freely. I’m serious. Isla also has frequent exchanges with a “fin man” (poor John Hannah), part of a mythical species of whiskered seal-like creatures that haunt the waters, bobbing up to lure land-dwellers into the murky depths.

One of Isla and Sandy’s preferred deterrents to keep incomers away is to dress up in home-made Wicker Man-type bird costumes and masks — which at least gets them out of their hideous knitwear. If their hostile squawking doesn’t work, they take up primitive weapons. Daniel is greeted with a rock to the head and then dangled over a cliff. But he saves himself by telling Isla and Sandy he’s a wizard (like Catweazle!), snapping a photo of them on his cellphone and threatening to use it to delete their souls.

What follows is a predictable détente during which Daniel paints a rosy picture of relocation to a comfortable home and easier lives on the mainland. Given that stories are Isla and Sandy’s chief currency, he also entertains them by taking ownership of Tolkien and recasting himself as Gandalf.

Romantic complications ensue when time spent with Daniel sparks impulses that the siblings don’t know what to do with, beyond roping him into a gull initiation ceremony. And violence intrudes when Roz grows impatient for results and deploys hotheaded Calum to clean up the mess.

But this is designed to be a heartwarming comedy and debuting feature director Paxton is more assured with the outcome than he is about getting there. Some actual funny gags in the late action — a queer awakening avec bear; a hard headbutt when Daniel moves in for a kiss, confusing Isla — hint at what the story could have been with a less cutesy touch.

Almost in spite of its full-scale charm offensive — the score’s plucky strings and horns really are a bit much — The Incomer acquires poignancy through Gleeson’s playful, unassuming performance. Watching Daniel stand up to Roz is a victory for social justice in a rapacious modern world, while the fear of change embodied by Isla and Sandy ultimately is quite touching. While I found the movie a mostly annoying guano pileup, some no doubt will respond more receptively to its quirky exploration of human connection.