Review: 'The Incomer' is an eccentric Scottish comedy that gets its best humor from its three strange main characters

Writer-director Louis Paxton’s “The Incomer” joins that particular genre of small, strange comedies from the British Isles, where eccentric characters come up against the system in all its impersonal bureaucracy.

The eccentrics here are Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), siblings who have lived 30-plus years, since early childhood, on Auke Isle, a forbidding hunk of rock in far northern Scotland. They never come to the mainland, and Isla bears a particular fear of the water, because of the Fin Man (John Hannah) who lives there and wants to drag her down and eat her — or, at least that’s what she thinks would happen.

The siblings frequently train to defend themselves and their home from outsiders, or “incomers.” One day, such a person lands at the dock at the water’s edge. He’s Daniel (played by Domhnall Gleeson), and he represents the local Scottish council, with orders to evacuate the people living there.

Isla and Sandy, of course, don’t want to go, and dangle Daniel on the edge of a cliff to make their point. Over time, Daniel starts to understand the siblings’ odd ways, while Sandy and Isla start to see Daniel as something they haven’t had in decades: A friend.

Paxton gets the best out of these three actors, who make the most out of their characters: O’Rourke playing Sandy as the overgrown child; Gleeson finding the inner nerd within the dull civil servant; and especially Rankin as Isla, whose protective armor against outsiders masks a sense of wonder at what they can do.

“The Incomer” doesn’t completely come together, particularly in an island climax that delivers too much slapstick in a movie that got along fine without it. When the movie is at its best, it burrows deep into these three lonely people finding connection at the outer reaches of Great Britain.

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‘The Incomer’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 2, at theaters everywhere. Rated R for brief graphic nudity. Running time: 102 minutes.