Islands: gripping thriller ‘shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs’

Stacy Martin and Sam Riley

(Image credit: Augenschein Filmproduktion / Leonine Studios / Schiwago Film / Alamy)

“German director Jan-Ole Gerster’s mesmerising, mostly English-language film ‘Islands’ opens with a scene” that would normally mark “rock bottom”, said Peter Debruge in Variety. Tom, its protagonist (Sam Riley), wakes up “in a field of sand dunes”; he could have been dropped from heaven, but it becomes clear that he has simply passed out drunk, again. The camera pans left, and there is the vast resort hotel in Fuerteventura where this washed-out former tennis pro, who claims to have once beaten Rafael Nadal, now works, teaching the game to tourists by day, and getting plastered in the island’s bars by night. He is just about getting by with this routine, but when smart English couple Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing) turn up at the resort, his life takes an unexpected turn. The “blonde and alluringly refined” Anne asks him to give private lessons to her son Anton (Dylan Torrell), and there seems to be a palpable chemistry between them.

At this point, we seem to be heading for “a classic film noir set-up: the dissolute dupe falling hook, line and sinker for a duplicitous femme fatale”, said Tom Charity in Sight and Sound. And that sense is reinforced when the obnoxious Dave suddenly disappears and suspicion falls on Anne. But then the film abruptly departs from this template.

Gerster “juggles clues and red herrings” with an ingenuity reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph. Every twist here is “contingent on what the characters assume, not what they actually know”, and several plot points are left deliberately ambiguous until very late in the game. Psychologically acute and brilliantly acted, “Islands” “shimmers, convinces and thoroughly absorbs” from start to finish.