'The Incomer': when Caithness became a fictional island

I knew that something was being filmed in Caithness because I encountered the crew while conducting a tour, although nobody was prepared to tell me very much about it. When I asked one crew member what the film involved, he offered a single peculiar clue: a woman finds a sex toy washed up on a beach and it changes her life. I returned home and repeated this to Sally-Ann, neither of us entirely convinced that he had been telling me the truth.

More than a year later, we sat down in our local cinema to watch The Incomer, the debut feature from Scottish writer-director Louis Paxton. When a pink sex toy appeared upon the beach during one of the early scenes, I immediately realised that the crew member had been completely honest. The film follows isolated siblings Isla and Sandy, played by Gayle Rankin and Grant O’Rourke, whose strange existence upon a remote Scottish island is disrupted by Daniel, an awkward council worker played by Domhnall Gleeson. His arrival threatens their home but also forces all three characters to confront their isolation.

The fictional island is assembled almost entirely from locations around Caithness and the neighbouring North Highlands. Filmed over 28 days, the production used places around Wick, Thurso, Latheron, Bruan, Lybster, Helmsdale, Strathy and Melvich. Watching it became a game of landscape bingo because places I visit regularly appeared beside others I had not seen for years. The film may be inspired by island communities, but the moss, rocks, sea cliffs, farms and enormous skies belong unmistakably to Caithness.

The Incomer is strange, surreal and certainly not a conventional blockbuster, yet its eccentricity made me smile because fragments of its characters felt oddly familiar. At times, it resembled a rather unhinged tourist film about Caithness, populated by exaggerated versions of people one might almost recognise. It is entertaining, immersive and particularly rewarding for anyone who knows the county, although it also offers future visitors an unconventional introduction to the landscape. If you have visited before, it may leave you pointing excitedly at the screen while wondering how Caithness has managed to look so convincingly like nowhere else.

To learn more, book one of our North Coast Explorer private tours.