The Incomer (2026) Review: The Weirdest, Warmest Movie I’ve Seen All Year
Every once in a while, a movie comes along that is so strange, so specific, and so committed to its own little universe that you either reject it immediately or fall completely under its spell.
The Incomer got me.
Directed by Louis Paxton, The Incomer is a British fantasy comedy-drama starring Domhnall Gleeson, Gayle Rankin, Grant O’Rourke, Michelle Gomez, and John Hannah. It follows Isla and Sandy, a brother and sister who have spent decades isolated on a remote Scottish island, living according to their own traditions, hunting birds, eating oysters, fearing the sea, and occasionally communicating with things that may—or may not—exist.
Then the government sends Daniel.
And Daniel has an iPhone.
That is basically all the civilization required to completely screw up their world.
Nobody Likes an Incomer
Isla and Sandy have spent roughly 30 years separated from the mainland following the disappearance of their parents. Their father left them with one very important rule:
Allow no incomer.
Unfortunately, Daniel, played by Domhnall Gleeson, has been sent by the local council to remove them from the island.
Daniel isn't exactly an intimidating representative of government power. He's anxious, awkward, bureaucratic, and spectacularly unprepared for two semi-feral siblings who have apparently spent most of their lives preparing for this exact invasion.
The resulting conflict becomes part folk tale, part culture-clash comedy, part family drama, and part satire about what happens when bureaucracy crashes into people who have created an entire civilization of their own.
The premise sounds dark—and underneath everything, it actually is—but Paxton's editing and technical timing constantly lean into the comedy.
Domhnall Gleeson Discovers the Greatest Power of the Modern World: The iPhone
One of my favorite gags involves Daniel realizing that Isla and Sandy have absolutely no concept of modern technology.
So he takes their picture.
Rather than explaining photography, Daniel convinces them that he's a wizard and has captured their souls inside his phone.
Better yet, he threatens to delete their souls.
It's such a stupidly simple joke, but it tells you everything about the movie. Daniel isn't suddenly some brilliant survivalist. He just realizes that, to people who have never seen an iPhone, the average guy from the council basically is Gandalf.
Later, he goes even further and retells The Lord of the Rings as a bureaucratic epic involving local authorities, the council, and head office.
That's the kind of humor The Incomer does extremely well: fantasy mythology smashed directly into painfully ordinary modern life.
“My Mouth Is Alive!”
Grant O'Rourke's Sandy delivers another one of my favorite moments when he tries a banana for the first time.
His reaction?
“My mouth is alive!”
Sandy also becomes possibly the worst tour guide in Scotland as he proudly points out the island's attractions:
“Spiky grass.”
“Rusty thing.”
“A spooky door.”
That's their world.
And the movie never treats that world as merely a setup for jokes. That's important.
At first, Isla and Sandy seem completely ridiculous. Gradually, you begin to understand that these rituals, names, myths, and landmarks are the architecture they've built around themselves to survive.
Their strange little culture matters because it matters to them.
The Movie Gets Much Better When Everybody Stops Fighting
The turning point for me comes when Daniel rescues Sandy from the sea.
Both siblings fear the water and can't swim, so Daniel's decision to save him creates an uneasy peace between the incomer and the islanders.
Suddenly the movie becomes less about civilized man versus weird island people and more about three lonely human beings trying to understand one another.
Even dinner becomes a cultural negotiation.
Daniel is vegan.
Isla and Sandy essentially live on meat.
They are absolutely baffled by the concept and wonder how this mainland creature could possibly remain alive without eating animals.
The joke works because neither side really understands the other. Everyone thinks they're normal.
That's one of the things I loved most about The Incomer.
Seagulls, Rituals and a Talking Seal-Man
Then there is the mythology.
Isla and Sandy haven't merely survived on this island. They've created a belief system around it, including a bizarre ceremony involving the gulls that helps define their culture.
And Isla has visions of something much darker: a dangerous seal-like creature called a Finman, played by John Hannah.
The creature emerges as a kind of supernatural voice tempting Isla toward dangerous ideas and the sea she already fears. Whether we're watching literal magic, mythology, hallucination, or some combination of all three isn't really the point.
For Isla, it's real.
That's why the fantasy works.
The Incomer doesn't build some gigantic effects-heavy mythology and dump three thousand years of lore on you. Its mythology feels handmade—like stories created by isolated people to explain a world they don't completely understand.
That gives the movie the feeling of a modern folk fairy tale without losing the absurdity.
Gayle Rankin Goes Completely Feral
Gayle Rankin commits to Isla with the kind of performance this movie absolutely needs.
Isla throws rocks. She screeches like a gull. She wears bizarre combinations of feathers and bones. She is suspicious of basically everything Daniel represents.
Rankin could have played her purely as a comedy character.
Instead, there's something much more vulnerable underneath the aggression.
Isla isn't merely defending some weird island.
She's defending the only reality she knows.
That becomes increasingly important as Daniel's arrival forces both siblings to confront the possibility that the world they've constructed cannot remain untouched forever.
Is the Scottish Government Really Going Around Evicting People From Islands?
The movie also sent me down a rabbit hole because its central setup raises an obvious question:
Does Scotland actually do this?
The notes behind this review point to an important distinction: the movie's forced-relocation setup is primarily a satirical device rather than a literal depiction of modern Scottish property law. The story also echoes a much older and darker piece of Scottish history—the Highland Clearances, when families were removed from ancestral lands by landlords and clan chiefs.
That history gives the movie's ridiculous council-worker-versus-islanders premise an interesting shadow.
On the surface, Daniel is just an awkward government employee with paperwork.
To Isla and Sandy, he's the latest outsider arriving to tell them that the world they've inherited no longer belongs to them.
That's a much sadder idea hiding underneath a very funny movie.
Weird Movie Month Accidentally Found a Feel-Good Movie
I went into The Incomer thinking it belonged in Weird Movie Month.
It absolutely does.
We have semi-feral island siblings.
A government bureaucrat pretending his iPhone is a magical soul-stealing device.
A man discovering bananas.
Seagull ceremonies.
A Finman.
And John Hannah apparently deciding that playing a mysterious folklore-inspired seal-man sounds like a perfectly reasonable day's work.
But somehow all of that weirdness adds up to something genuinely warm.
The movie has heart.
It understands that the strangest things about people are sometimes the things they use to protect themselves. Strip away the gulls, myths, bones, government forms, vegan jokes, and wizard phones, and you're left with people terrified of losing the world they understand.
And people trying to connect anyway.
Johnny Spoiler Says: BINGE NOW
I don't hand out many Binge Nows.
So pay attention.
BINGE NOW.
The Incomer isn't just a great Weird Movie Month selection. With its heart, whimsy, strange humor, and unexpectedly moving relationships, you could bring this thing back for Feel-Good Movie Month and it would still work.
As of right now, The Incomer is the best movie I've seen in 2026.
That's a sentence I didn't expect to write about a movie featuring a man whose first experience with a banana makes him announce that his mouth has come alive.
But here we are.
Binge Now.
Want more weird movies? Listen to Johnny Spoiler and the Binge-Watchers Podcast for more movies that somehow escaped the algorithm, questionable cinematic discoveries, cult favorites, horror, comedy, and the eternal question:
Binge Now, Binge Later, or Binge Never?
