Sundance film festival: The actor is a charming presence in the otherwise overly twee and consistently unfunny tale of isolated siblings dealing with a visitor

Once upon a time, two siblings lived on an abandoned Scottish isle, isolated from the modern world and suspicious of all outsiders. The siblings, a brother and sister, believed themselves to be descended from the gulls that peppered the island’s scenic cliffs; they also believed, on some level, that they too were gulls – or, at least, they acted like it, flapping and squawking about.

Debauched fairytales like these loom large over The Incomer, Scottish writer-director Louis Paxton’s odd and aggressively quaint first feature, which asks a high conceptual buy-in of its audience. From the first shots of Isla (Gayle Rankin) and Sandy (Grant O’Rourke) caw-caw-ing like birds and beating sacks labeled “incomer” with clubs, Paxton commits to an askew, often alienating angle of humor – quirky, at times juvenile, a touch dark, altogether difficult to settle into for anyone with an aversion to twee.

The Incomer is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution

Sundance film festival: two teenage girls find their friendship put to the test in a witty and charmingly odd British comedy

If you know, you know that first best friendship is a world unto itself – lush, rugged and expansive, nutritive and intoxicating, vulnerable to freak changes in the weather. Its specific terrain stays invisible to outsiders; only the two within it know, and they themselves are likely to lose it in time. So goes the perilous trekking in Extra Geography, Molly Manners’ nimble and frequently funny debut film, which astutely maps the peaks and valleys of one charged friendship between two adolescent girls at an English boarding school.

Minna and Flic, played by remarkable newcomers Galaxie Clear (coming for Chase Infiniti’s name game) and Marni Duggan, begin year 10 sometime in the early 2000s, in a sunny meadow of boundless, heady entanglement. They move in playful unison, share beds and mannerisms, hold common goals (Oxbridge) and disdain (for boys, and those who covet them). Manners, a Bafta nominee for her work on the better-than-it-should-be Netflix series One Day, is particularly attuned to the energizing rhythm of platonic-ish intimacy; the first third of this brisk, 94-minute film is a mesmerizing symphony of female mind-meld, the girls slamming lockers, opening notebooks, flopping on the floor and hatching plans to a swift, synchronous beat.