ACTOR John Hannah has taken up cold water swimming anyway but it still can’t have been much fun immersed in the North Sea to play the part of a selkie for the award-winning film, The Incomer.
He’s there trying to lure an islander who can’t swim to a watery grave but despite his efforts to make the icy depths seem fun, he can’t quite hide the malevolence lurking behind his seemingly innocent enticements.
That Hannah manages to seem both scary and friendly at almost the same time is a tribute to his acting skills as well as the team behind his make up.
The film goes on general release in September after being chosen to open the Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) this month.
Filmed in Caithness, it has already won the Next Innovator Award at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival
and delighted its first Edinburgh audience with its humour and occasional pathos.
As well as Hannah, it stars Domhnall Gleeson and Scottish actors Michelle Gomez, Gayle Rankin, Grant O’Rourke and Emun Elliott.
It’s the debut of Edinburgh filmmaker Louis Paxton, who said opening the EIFF was a “dream come true”.
“Screening in my beloved hometown and the festival where I started as a teenage usher, sharing this story with a Scottish audience, is nothing short of mind-blowing,” he said. “I couldn’t ask for a more meaningful premiere.”
The story follows an island sister and brother who live alone on a Scottish island which has been abandoned by the rest of the community, leaving them isolated from the outside world and determined to fight any attempts to uproot them.
There are echoes of the evacuation of St Kilda in the early 20th century and while the islanders are initially portrayed as unhinged and practically feral, the film gradually teases out more positive aspects of their existence compared with modern “civilisation”.
However, their world is upended with the arrival of Daniel (Gleeson), an awkward council worker tasked with uprooting them to the mainland.
He’s been ordered to the island by his manager played by Gomez who does a fine turn as the office boss from hell.
Meanwhile Daniel, who takes awkwardness to the next level, gradually finds that he fits in quite well in a place unconstrained by social mores even though he’s a misfit in what passes as civilisation.
The two islanders have developed their own extremely strange ways of adapting to their isolated home and both actors deserve plaudits, as does Gleeson, for making their characters both weird and likable.
Animation by Orcadian Serena Wagner is woven into the film which gives it a fairy tale quality, with a hint of the Brothers Grimm and a deep injection of Scottish humour.
Film producers Shirley O’Connor and Emily Gotto said it had been an honour to open the EIFF with The Incomer.
“Shooting in Scotland with this exceptional cast and crew was a genuinely special experience and bringing that work home to a Scottish audience means everything to us,” they said.
“Huge thanks to EIFF and all our partners, including Screen Scotland, who helped get us here.”
Festival director Paul Ridd said The Incomer was “precisely the kind of film that EIFF is all about.”
“With wit, grace and intelligence, this striking, unpredictable and beautifully acted Scottish debut dazzled, moved and amused us immensely when we first saw it back in January,” he said.
“We were thrilled to open this year’s edition with a film which embodies such a stirring and inspiring spirit of creativity, empathy and invention in filmmaking.”
Isabel Davis, Screen Scotland executive director, said the film was an “extraordinarily assured debut feature”.
“This singular story of a remote community on Scotland’s far North coast feels truly distinctive, something that could only have come from here,” she said.
The film was also supported by the British Film Institute (BFI).
“It’s a terrific film that looks at Scottish island life, sibling relationships and the quiet forms of loneliness that shape people — but it does so with such generosity and bright humour,” said Mia Bays, BFI Filmmaking Fund director.
“Watching Daniel reassess the world he’s taken for granted when he meets Isla and Sandy (the peerless Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke) is both moving and gloriously funny.”
The Incomer goes on general release on September 4
