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(Sundance Film Festival) THE INCOMER: Islands, Outsiders, and the Stories We Refuse to Leave

By. Professor Horror

    

    THE INCOMER, directed by Louis Paxton, premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival where it won the NEXT Innovator Award, and it is easy to see why. Paxton crafts a strange, tender, and darkly humorous fable about isolation, belief, and the quiet danger of stories that grow too comfortable. The film follows two grown siblings who have lived their entire lives on an isolated island with only each other for company. Then one day, their world shifts when an incomer named Daniel arrives, and as these two realities collide, the line between storytelling and truth begins to blur. THE INCOMER reminds us that you don’t have to live on a remote island to be profoundly isolated; sometimes the island is simply the story you refuse to leave.

There was once an island far out on the sea, and on this island lived a sister and brother. This pair was told to protect the island at any cost. Years of isolation might make this poor old lot mad, but you would be wrong…they are incredibly normal. Disturbingly normal. They spend their days talking to each other, tending chores, and preparing to fight any fearsome Incomer. They have trained their whole lives for a moment that may never come, rehearsing battle strategies with the seriousness of bedtime prayers. Their routines are well rehearsed and they have established a very particular way of life that is built on the assumption that the outside world is a threat and that safety only exists within the borders of their small shore.

 

    The sister, Isla (Gayle Rankin), copes with isolation differently than her brother. She sees strange creatures, most notably Mr. Fin Man (John Hannah), a walrus-looking gentleman who appears near the waterline whispering promises. He tempts Isla toward the sea with visions of delicious food, other people, and a life beyond her sole companion. He is equal parts folklore, hallucination, and emotional coping mechanism. Basically, a fantasy dressed in flippers and riddles. The water itself becomes more than a setting: it is a villain, a border, and a living threat. For the siblings, the ocean is not freedom but danger, a devouring edge that separates their safe mythology from the unknown. Isla resists both Mr. Fin Man and the shoreline with fierce devotion and clings to the island not because it is safe, but because it is known.

Any time an object washes ashore that hints at another life (a magazine, a bottle, a sex toy) the siblings lock it away like forbidden scripture. These items are portals to curiosity, and curiosity is treated like contamination. Sandy (Grant O’Rourke), however, is naturally inquisitive. His lack of real-world experience makes him approach most things with childlike wonder that is both endearing and frequently hilarious. He marvels at simple objects the way other people marvel at fireworks, and his earnest fascination often produces the film’s funniest moments. Sandy is comedic because he is a grown man denied context, navigating adulthood with the emotional vocabulary of a child. His joy contrasts sharply with Isla’s vigilance, which reveals how two people raised in the same mythology can respond to it in completely different ways.

 

    The siblings live in what can only be described as a cult of two, with their father long gone still functioning as their invisible cult leader. Their knowledge of the world beyond their limited shelves is nonexistent, and their entire existence rises and sets on the mythology he built for them. Paxton visually reinforces this through animated retellings of the father’s stories that appear as Isla remembers them. These sequences are whimsical yet unsettling, turning bedtime folklore into moving murals of fear. The tales describe devil-like Incomers who lure island people into temptation, leaving only one pure family behind. It is folklore weaponized as parenting, animated into a living doctrine that continues to control them.

 

    However, the arrival of Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson) fractures this preserved reality. He informs them that because their home is a gull preserve, they are being evicted and must immediately leave. He is not a monster, not a villain (just a man with paperwork) yet to the siblings he embodies every warning they were raised to fear. This collision reveals that THE INCOMER is less about physical isolation and more about existential outsiderhood. Daniel lives on the mainland surrounded by people, noise, and all the variety and avocados he could hope for, yet he is more alone than Isla and Sandy. The siblings are isolated geographically, but Daniel is isolated emotionally. Everyone in this film is an outsider somewhere and cling to their own narratives for stability.

 

    Fantasy in THE INCOMER is neither pure escapism nor pure delusion: it is infrastructure. The siblings use stories as emotional scaffolding, but Daniel is not exempt from this impulse because he simply disguises his fantasies differently. While Isla and Sandy inherit mythologies from their father, Daniel knowingly retells the adventures of Frodo and the Gandalf repackaging epic quests as if they were his own lived experiences. He understands they are stories, yet still needs them, proving that fantasy is not reserved for the isolated or the naïve. As the characters exchange narratives, they begin to understand one another, revealing that storytelling itself is the true language of connection. Even when the tales of the island and the fin folk are fabricated, they still shape perception, identity, and behavior. And it is here that the film quietly asks when fantasy stops being protective and starts becoming a prison. Stories can liberate, but they can also calcify. They can hide trauma, soften grief, and offer comfort, yet they can also freeze a person in place, preserving fear like an insect in amber. In THE INCOMER, the danger is not that people believe in stories…it is that they forget they are allowed to edit them.

 

    Despite its darker themes, the film is laced with humor. Sandy’s naïve sincerity and the bizarre supporting characters create genuine laugh-out-loud moments that keep the story buoyant without undermining its emotional weight. Paxton’s direction suggests that losing touch with reality does not require a deserted island. All it takes is a convincing story, repeated often enough, and the fear of what happens if you stop believing it. THE INCOMER is ultimately a film about borders (between land and water, truth and myth, childhood and adulthood) and the quiet terror of discovering that the line you defended your entire life may never have existed at all.