Sumerian Pictures popped up on my radar earlier this year when they snapped up Sundance darling Josephine, surprising a lot of people who did not know what Sumerian was and weren’t entirely sure what that meant for the future of Josephine in terms of its awards possibilities. Despite the critical acclaim and its success at Sundance, will it actually go on to land any Oscar nominations this year? That’s still a question that has to be answered. But Sumerian picked up more than just Josephine. They also picked up The Incomer, the new Scottish comedy written and directed by Louis Paxton, starring Domhnall Gleeson as Daniel, a pencil pusher tasked with removing people from their land. If you’re looking for something to watch on Columbus Day, congratulations. I have found your movie. There’s nothing quite like sending a white guy to an island to kick people off of it because his government believes it owns the place and therefore has the right to relocate the people already living there. Hilarity ensues.

The twist here is that the brother and sister Daniel encounters, Isla and Sandy, played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke, aren’t technically indigenous to the island themselves. Their parents moved there, and Isla and Sandy were born and raised in isolation, meaning the island is essentially the only world they have ever known. They don’t know about electricity, television, modern medicine or a whole bunch of other things. They only know what their parents taught them, some of which turns out to be nonsense. They were also taught from childhood to distrust anyone who might come onto their island and trained to believe that if outsiders ever invaded, they were supposed to kill them. So naturally, when Daniel arrives, they don’t kill him. Instead, they take him hostage and become increasingly curious about him, the supplies he brought and the strange modern technology that has suddenly invaded their tiny world.

There’s even a gag involving the belief that photography can steal someone’s soul, which Daniel tries to use to his advantage with his phone, seemingly hoping he once watched the same Discovery Channel special everybody else did. The Incomer frequently feels like the kind of movie Taika Waititi might have made, except he didn’t. It has that same offbeat, irreverent sense of humor wrapped around something considerably more serious. Underneath all of this absurdity is an allegory about colonization, ownership and the strange concept that governments can simply draw boundaries around land and decide it belongs to them. Isla and Sandy aren’t indigenous to the island in the traditional sense, but they were born there, they’ve never known anywhere else, and there’s no competing indigenous population. For all practical purposes, this is their home. Meanwhile, Daniel represents this larger bureaucratic idea that the island belongs to somebody else simply because a government says it does.

That raises questions the film doesn’t necessarily seem interested in answering. Why exactly do Isla and Sandy need to leave? What does the government gain by removing them? It’s not like they’re standing in the way of somebody building a Sandals resort. They’re just there. They live on this island, and apparently that is enough of an inconvenience that somebody has decided they need to go. Daniel isn’t even normally the guy who delivers these kinds of eviction notices, which only adds another layer of absurdity to the situation. He’s a bureaucrat who has wandered into a scenario for which no amount of paperwork could possibly prepare him.

The trio at the center of The Incomer are pretty hilarious together. There’s an entire conversation where Sandy is desperately trying to cover up something he actually did by admitting to something else, and he launches into this increasingly elaborate story involving an experience he had milking a seal. It is so hilariously nonsensical that I couldn’t help but appreciate it. I was laughing throughout the sequence even though my advance screener did not come with audio description, which meant there were inevitably visual jokes and details I wasn’t getting. That’s particularly frustrating with this kind of comedy because the humor isn’t limited to dialogue. Sometimes the joke is somebody’s reaction, an object in the frame or the physical absurdity of what’s happening.

The film also brings in a fantasy element through the Fin Man, played by John Hannah, a mythical figure connected to Isla and the siblings’ strange understanding of the world around them. That’s another reason audio description feels particularly important here. The Incomer isn’t simply three people standing around exchanging funny dialogue. Paxton is playing with folklore, fantasy, isolation and the siblings’ perception of reality, and there were inevitably visual elements of that which I couldn’t fully access from the screener I was given.

I also don’t really know yet what accessibility is going to look like with Sumerian Pictures. They’re still relatively new to me as a distributor, so I don’t know whether audio description is going to be a priority across their releases, whether The Incomer will ultimately receive a track, or whether any track that does exist will be passed through to premium video on demand and eventual streaming services. For that matter, I’m curious where Sumerian’s movies ultimately land in the streaming ecosystem. When The Incomer and eventually Josephine finish their theatrical and transactional runs, where do they go? These are questions that will become easier to answer as Sumerian establishes more of a track record as a distributor.

For now, I’m intrigued by The Incomer as one of the films they’ve chosen to help establish that track record in North America. This isn’t an obvious awards play like Josephine. It’s an eccentric Scottish comedy whose audience is probably going to be people specifically looking for something weird, irreverent and a little bit different. It doesn’t have all of the same directorial flourishes or rhythms that a Taika Waititi film would have, but that remains the closest comparison I can make. There’s a similar willingness to make something deeply silly while allowing some surprisingly substantial ideas to sit underneath all the silliness.

I liked the performances across the board, particularly the strange chemistry between Gleeson, Rankin and O’Rourke. The dynamic between Daniel, Isla and Sandy keeps reshaping itself as the story progresses, particularly as the siblings learn more about the possibilities of the modern world and Daniel becomes increasingly comfortable with the two people who initially took him hostage. Everybody’s understanding of everybody else changes. The supposedly civilized outsider doesn’t necessarily have all the answers, and the supposedly primitive people living in isolation aren’t simply waiting around for modern society to rescue them. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of dismantling everybody’s assumptions about everybody else.

If The Incomer releases with audio description, this becomes a pretty easy recommendation for me. Without audio description, it was occasionally a stumble through the wilderness, but there were enough humorous moments to keep me interested and engaged. I liked The Incomer, and I strongly suspect I would like it even more with audio description. I can’t imagine a track detracting from this movie at all. If anything, it would provide additional clarification and probably unlock even more of the comedy already built into the visual performances.

And if The Incomer manages to stick around in theaters until Columbus Day, there is something beautifully ridiculous about going to see a movie about a guy who boldly walks onto an island he doesn’t live on, doesn’t personally own, and tells the people already living there that this is actually his government’s land and they need to leave. Films have such short theatrical lives anymore that it could already be heading toward PVOD by then, but I’m hoping it survives. Columbus Day doesn’t necessarily need our help celebrating it, but since we’re apparently still stuck with it as a federal holiday, we might as well spend part of the day watching a comedy that pokes at the very ideas of ownership, colonization and entitlement that make the holiday so complicated in the first place.

So storm your local movie theater and tell them it’s yours. Demand to see The Incomer. And if it doesn’t have audio description, demand that somebody accompany you into the theater and describe the damn thing. Because nothing quite says Columbus Day like manifest destiny.

Fresh: 8.7.7/10