The Incomer
It is beyond Daniel’s normal duties, but his manager Rose is quite insistent with Calum who normally handles doorstep evictions having been suspended while under investigation, sent by boat to remote and supposedly uninhabited Auke Isle where he will be empowered to act as land recovery enforcer for the North Eastern Scottish Council who have recently become aware that the rough and unwelcoming territory houses two interlopers.
Sister and brother Isla and Sandy having been alone for thirty years since their parents died, their mother on the mainland and their father taken by the waves, they have raised themselves in the ways of the island, cutting and carrying peat, living off porridge and blubber when they can get it, dressing as gulls and trapping the bounty of the skies, destroying any item they find washed ashore and prepared to defend themselves against invaders.
Written and directed by Louis Paxton, Ex Machina’s Domnhall Gleeson is Daniel, The Incomer, though he is as much an outsider as Men’s Gayle Rankin and Outlander’s Grant O’Rourke as strange siblings Isla and Sandy, existing in isolation their entire lives with no company but for each other and Isla’s manipulative aquatic confidante Mister Finman (Bad Day at the Office’s John Hannah), eager for her to leave her half-life on the land and join under the waves.
Daniel lonely and regarded as “a bit of a weirdo,” his sympathy towards the pair he feels a duty of care to is at odds with the demands of Rose (Doctor Who’s Michelle Gomez) that they are to be evicted and left to fend for themselves, unfamiliar with life off Auke Isle and with only the barest parochial education, while they are initially hostile but soon find themselves enchanted by their visitor, first by his novelty then as a new friend.
Shot on the forbidding north coast of Scotland, crashing waves and crags and windblown fields, The Incomer is comedy, drama, folktale and parable, stories told and old secrets kept, tied with the mythology of the land and the people who exist between man and beast, Isla and Sandy considering initiating Daniel into their ways if they deem him to be worthy, their resistance to forced relocation from their home valid but their existence as it is unsustainable.
Trying to negotiate the balance between his obligations and the desires of the islanders without “going native,” complicated by the clandestine arrival of Calum (Mission’s Emun Elliott), Daniel finds his position is untenable without compromise, between the rock of Auke Isle and the hard place of his career, The Incomer an uplifting tale of abandoning caution to the wind like the birds do, attempting to fly even if it means crashing down.
Having premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Incomer is now on general release
