Sundance film festival: The actor is a charming presence in the otherwise overly twee and consistently unfunny tale of isolated siblings dealing with a visitor
O
nce upon a time, two siblings lived on an abandoned Scottish isle, isolated from the modern world and suspicious of all outsiders. The siblings, a brother and sister, believed themselves to be descended from the gulls that peppered the island’s scenic cliffs; they also believed, on some level, that they too were gulls – or, at least, they acted like it, flapping and squawking about.
Debauched fairytales like these loom large over The Incomer, Scottish writer-director Louis Paxton’s odd and aggressively quaint first feature, which asks a high conceptual buy-in of its audience. From the first shots of Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke) caw-caw-ing like birds and beating sacks labeled “incomer” with clubs, Paxton commits to an askew, often alienating angle of humor – quirky, at times juvenile, a touch dark, altogether difficult to settle into for anyone with an aversion to twee.
It does not help that Isla and Sandy, left on the island by their deceased parents years earlier, act more like children than adults, brutish and blunt and stunted in ways more off-putting than endearing. With no other human contact, the two believably live on the border of reality and myth, entertaining themselves with stories – relayed to us in animated pencil sketches, as narrated by Isla – of the gull ancestors and evil selkie-esque creatures that demand human sacrifice. (In a cringy flourish, said selkie also appears as a man in an obvious wetsuit and black contacts, beckoning Isla into the sea).
