Island of daft souls: "The Incomer"

The Incomer feels like Universal and Focus Features angling for another The Ballad of Wallis Island - last year's biggest sleeper hit - and landing a very different kettle of fish. It, too, has an island at its centre, but it's a fairly remote one - some distance off the coast of Scotland - and it could scarcely seem less like the restorative safe space on which its notional predecessor unfolded. As we land, Auch Isle's sole residents are a pair of borderline feral siblings: the punningly named Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O'Rourke), grown adults who, after the passing of their parents and in the absence of others, have taken to dressing and behaving like little kids, conversing in their own shared language. "Bottom-mess" is their longhand for excrement; "incomers", barely fouler, is their word for arrivals from the mainland, whom the siblings have learnt to mistrust if not violently repel. It seems almost inevitable, then, that an incomer should eventually come in. His name is Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson, restyled with shaggy perm and tousled eyebrows), a council flunky who's been sent this way as the bearer of bad tidings, namely that the siblings are to be evicted and relocated in the name of progress. Our initial expectation is for some kind of culture-clash comedy - Ealing, updated for the age of Wes Anderson - about a buttoned-down normie and the wild-and-woolly weirdos he encounters. Except that Daniel - whose power-dressing boss (Michelle Gomez) takes one look at the action figures on his desk and describes him as a "funny wee onion" - is himself a bit of a weirdo. So it's really three weirdos on an island, then, which wasn't quite what was going down on Wallis Island, and automatically feels like a tougher sell. For those still attempting to get their bearings, we're not all that far away from the Isle of Quirk, but also - happily - within swimming distance of another reference point: the Island of Daft Souls.

What's promising here is that this is palpably the work of an emergent writer-director using finite resources to create their own world. Some part of The Incomer's world is weird itself, borderline horror-adjacent: consider the Wicker Man-like bird costumes the siblings don in a bid to ward off incomers, the selkie-like demon (played by a damp, barely recognisable John Hannah) trying to tempt Isla to follow her mother towards a watery grave, or the last-reel invocation of cannibalism. Yet these Billy No-Mateses, long left to their own devices, start to make sense in this world, and they make you laugh because they make sense in this world. (Perhaps only in this world.) Gleeson earns top billing as a reward for helping to piece the financing together, but The Incomer proves an even better showcase for its Scottish leads. With her naturally downtrodden mouth and disapproving demeanour, Rankin could be Shirley Henderson's little sister; she makes Isla a fiercely protective and proud soul, even as her total lack of worldliness leaves her vulnerable to the elements. (The question this performance poses: what if someone had dropped Emily Watson's Bess from Breaking the Waves into an all-out comedy?) O'Rourke may be even funnier, playing Sandy as essentially a toddler with a beard, delighted to have found, in the ginger weakling Daniel, a brand-new playmate. Paxton has a gift for briskly offbeam characterisation: as played by Emun Elliott, the hard man the council eventually sends in to extricate Daniel turns out to be this world's idea of Jason Statham, performatively rolling out of shot having just washed down some corned beef with a quart of his own piss. It is, granted, another cosy item of post-Brexit British cinema, nervily gesturing towards the stories we tell ourselves and the fraught relationship between small islands and the outsiders in our midst. (Paxton would rather throw in a Lord of the Rings reference, playing to a nerdy home crowd, than pursue that line too far.) It's also so idiosyncratic it can't fail to leave some cinemagoers nonplussed and grumpy. Even those of us beguiled by this disarming latter-day folktale may find it one of those comedies where we laugh and not quite know why we laugh. (Sometimes it's as niche as a specific line inflection: "He's shouting at the sea!") But you are beguiled, and you do laugh.

The Incomer is now showing in selected cinemas.