The Incomer director Louis Paxton on opening this year’s Edinburgh Film Festival – and being mistaken for Moby

Having grown up in Edinburgh in a movie-loving household, worked as an usher at the Filmhouse and EIFF in his teenage years, then gone through the festival’s talent labs after studying film at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the National Film and Television School, let’s just say The Incomer’s title is not a term that could be applied to him.

“It’s just been a big part of my life since I was young,” says Paxton, who still lives in Edinburgh. “I saw so many great films there, and discovered so many amazing directors.”

The venue for the opening gala also happens to be the Cameo, which is where he did work experience when he was a pupil at James Gillespie's High School just up the road. “I don’t think they knew what to do with me so they let me watch lots of films and write a review of Apocalypse Now Redux, which they put in the newsletter. I don’t think I was even old enough to watch it.”

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It’s all a little surreal, in other words, which is a good way to describe The Incomer. Set on an island off the north of Scotland, it’s an offbeat comedy about a pair of orphaned siblings, Isla and Sandy (respectively played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke), who’ve grown up in isolation thanks to their father refusing to leave when the rest of the residents abandoned it for the mainland. With their mum dying young and their dad losing his mind and disappearing in mysterious circumstances, they’ve become feral, gull-munching maniacs, with their own linguistic quirks and paranoid delusions (Isla communes with a deranged mythical sea creature, played by an unrecognisable John Hannah).

As per the title, they also have a deep-rooted mistrust of incomers that manifests itself early on when they don ritualistic bird costumes and attack Daniel (Domhnall Gleeson), a lonely land recovery officer for the council who’s been dispatched to inform Isla and Sandy they’re to be relocated to the mainland. As a concept, it’s pretty out there.

“I think originally I’d intended to write something that was achievable as a first feature,” grins Paxton of the film’s three-character, single-location set-up (the film was shot in the north of Scotland, with Caithness doubling for the island). “It was supposed to be smaller, and then just grew legs.”

That’s partly because he started drawing on his fascination with the history of St Kilda, as well as on his own family connection to island life. “My grandfather’s from the Orkney Isles and we went there every year as kids,” he says.

The “we” incidentally is him and his older sister, Ruth Paxton, director of the acclaimed 2022 horror movie A Banquet. Given the heightened sibling rivalry in the film — which sees petty disagreements between Isla and Sandy turn into full-throttle attempts to bash each other’s brains in — can we infer a playful nod to his own childhood?

“I think there’s an element of that,” he smiles. “Me and my sister have a very different relationship. We’re very close and we support each other. But when we were growing up it was not always like that. If there’s anything in the film that I drew on from that relationship it would be that ability for things to escalate incredibly quickly.

“Luckily we reached an age where we put all that behind us,” he adds. “But it did play a part in the development of those characters. They’re adults, though, and there’s also a great joy in watching adults be children.”

There certainly is and it turns out Paxton is a big fan of the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers. Other inspirations included Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth and Taika Waititi’s Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

It’s an eclectic set of influences, and the oddball result might not chime with everyone. An early review from Sundance dismissed The Incomer as “aggressively quaint”, but that’s also to ignore its cultural specificity. The clichés about Scottish cinema are that it’s all Braveheart or working-class miserabalism, but really the best Scottish cinema has always been infused with a much more surreal, rule-breaking edge that allows filmmakers to approach complex themes in subversive ways.

“We're not a massive country in terms of the amount of work we produce for the cinema, but I do think we produce great work,” says Paxton, citing Peter Mullen’s Orphans and Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting as two Scottish films that had a big impact on him growing up.

“I wanted to make a film that felt really Scottish and that felt like it wasn't compromising on its Scottish identity, but that was completely accessible, wherever you came from.”

For all its intended silliness, The Incomer is, says Paxton, “about a pair of siblings whose parents have disappeared. It's quite sad at the core of it.”

He mentions Hunt for the Wilderpeople again. That was the example he used to show potential backers how a comedy with broad appeal could remain true to a filmmaker’s own heritage and he was pleasantly surprised when American audiences at Sundance subsequently quoted him lines from The Incomer that he thought might be “too Scottish”. “It was incredibly validating,” he beams.

Sundance had some strange moments too, like being mistaken for Moby. Which isn’t as random as it sounds. The musician is a producer on the film and because Paxton is bald, has glasses and tattoos, “which [Moby] also has” he quips, there were points when he’d be walking down Main Street and people would shout, "We love your music,” and he’d have to confess, “I’m not Moby.”

“When we met it was quite funny,” he says. “It was like this mirror thing going on. But he was lovely and really supportive. And he DJ’d our afterparty, which was brilliant. It was awesome.”

The Incomer screens at the Edinburgh International Film Festival on 13th, 14th and 15th August. www.edfilmfest.org

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