Film & Screen

'The Incomer' Review: Domhnall Gleeson Faces an Eviction Gone Wrong

Domhnall Gleeson gets more than he bargained for trying to evict two siblings in The Incomer, a quirky Scottish comedy set around one remote, escalating standoff.

‘The Incomer’ Review: A Remote Assignment
‘The Incomer’ Review: A Remote AssignmentAI-generated

Domhnall Gleeson stars in The Incomer, a Scottish comedy in which a routine eviction goes badly off script.

Gleeson plays a man sent to a remote location to evict two siblings, and he gets considerably more than he bargained for. What should be a straightforward legal errand becomes the engine of the film's offbeat humor, as the would-be evictor finds himself entangled with occupants who have no intention of leaving quietly.

The premise is simple and deliberately so. A man arrives with a job to do. Two siblings refuse to budge. The comedy builds from that standoff, drawing on the remoteness of the setting to isolate the characters and heighten the absurdity of the situation. The Scottish landscape works here not as scenery but as a pressure chamber: there is nowhere to go, and no easy way for Gleeson's character to walk away from the mess he has been sent to create.

Gleeson has built a career on characters who combine haplessness with genuine warmth, and this role sits squarely in that register. His character arrives expecting paperwork and compliance. He finds resistance, complication and a situation that steadily slips out of his control. That gap between expectation and reality is where the film locates most of its laughs.

The two siblings, meanwhile, function as the immovable object to Gleeson's increasingly unreliable force. Their refusal to leave is not treated as mere obstinacy; the film frames the standoff as a collision between an outsider sent to enforce a decision and people with their own claim to the place they occupy. The title itself underlines the dynamic — Gleeson's character is the incomer, the outsider who arrives with authority he cannot easily exercise.

The word "quirky" earns its place in any description of the film. This is a comedy of awkward encounters, delayed resolutions and characters who talk past each other in ways that are recognizably human rather than merely zany. The remoteness of the assignment sharpens every interaction, because there is no institution, no colleague and no escape route available to mediate the dispute.

For Gleeson, the role continues a pattern of character work in which he plays men undone by situations they underestimated. Here the underestimation is structural: he assumes the eviction is a formality. The siblings assume he will eventually give up. Both assumptions fail, and the film's comedy accumulates in the gap between them.

What The Incomer ultimately offers is a small-scale, character-driven comedy built on a single escalating predicament. No explosions, no elaborate set pieces — just an outsider, two stubborn residents and a remote corner of Scotland where the paperwork has run out of power.

Source: NYT Arts

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Marcus Bennett

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Staff writer covering industry trends and analytics at Arts & Voices.

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