There is a particular kind of British comedy that doesn't announce itself. It doesn't hire a star to mug for a camera, it doesn't lean on a punchline track, and it doesn't mistake weirdness for wit. The Incomer, directed with a precise, dry hand and set against the landscape of a Scottish island community that clearly has no interest in being charming to outsiders, is exactly that kind of film — and its newly released trailer confirms what festivalgoers in Park City were already saying quietly: this one is something special.

Domhnall Gleeson plays the title role, a man who arrives in a tight-knit Scottish community as an outsider — an incomer, in the local vocabulary — and proceeds to disrupt, flounder, and slowly, awkwardly matter. Gleeson, who has spent much of his career being asked to be the straight man in other people's chaos, here gets to be the chaos, and the fit is startling. He brings to the role the same quality he always brings — an almost painful sincerity — but the film lets the comedy land on top of that sincerity rather than against it.

The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, where it won an award and generated the kind of quiet word-of-mouth that tends to outlast the noisier premieres. It was subsequently selected as the opener for the Edinburgh Festival, a distinction that carries genuine weight in the landscape of Scottish cultural life. These are not the credentials of a film coasting on its cast; they are the credentials of a film that earned its reputation in rooms full of people who watch a lot of movies.

The supporting cast deepens the picture considerably. Gayle Rankin, increasingly one of the most interesting actors working in this register, and John Hannah, a performer who knows this particular strain of Scottish melancholy from the inside out, are both present — and from the trailer, both given genuine material to work with rather than being deployed as set dressing around a star.

What the trailer actually does well — which trailers for this kind of film routinely fail to do — is communicate tone without betraying the film's best moments. There is a lightness to it, a sense that the story is not going to punish its characters simply because the premise allows for it. The eviction comedy at its structural core (the incomer's arrival is, in some form, a disruption of established claims on place and belonging) could easily have curdled into something mean. It has not. The 92% critical score on Rotten Tomatoes, accumulated from festival circuit reviews, reflects that specific quality: critics responding to a film that is funny without being cruel.

The Incomer is scheduled for release in both the United Kingdom and the United States in September. The UK release date has been confirmed, and the film is being positioned for a theatrical run rather than a quiet streaming drop — which matters, because this is a film that will almost certainly benefit from an audience watching it together. The kind of comedy that plays differently in a room.

It is worth saying plainly what tends to get lost in the festival-circuit hype cycle: a 92% rating and a Sundance award do not guarantee that a film is for everyone. The Incomer appears, from all available evidence, to be a film with a specific pace, a specific register, and a specific faith in its audience's patience. That is a feature, not a bug. But audiences conditioned by faster, louder comedy should be warned that this film is going to ask something of them — and then reward it.

For now, the trailer is the thing. It is two minutes of Domhnall Gleeson being magnificently out of place on a Scottish island while a community watches him with the particular combination of suspicion and reluctant warmth that the British Isles have been perfecting for centuries. Watch it. Then mark September in the calendar.