Director – Jan-Ole Gerster – 2025 – Germany – Cert. 15 – 123m
****1/2
A British ex-pat tennis coach working for a hotel on a sun-drenched island in the Canaries gets more than he bargained for when he befriends the couple whose young son he is coaching – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 12th, and on BFI Player from Monday, October 27th
Tom (Sam Riley) wakes up in the desert and walks back to his car. He often nods off – at one point he is woken by a tap on his car window by the local police chief Jorge (Pep Ambròs) in a scene reminiscent of the one in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), one of the differences being that he’s a local and he and the cop not only know each other, but are friends. (Another is that in Psycho, the motorist is a woman and the cop a man, which brings a whole other dynamic into play.) Jorge fines him for a traffic violation, but apologises for the fact, and the two men’s friendship is able to accommodate that.
The desert, or beach, is a very specific location: Fuerteventura, one of the Canary Islands. And Tom has manoeuvred his life into a very nice routine, thank you very much, as he sees it. He is a tennis coach attached to the island’s one hotel, with guests booking slots in his daily timetable. Nights, he heads to Waikiki, the local club, to excessively drink and frenziedly dance the night away, perhaps picking up a willing female or two to get him through.
After such benders, he often misses his first coaching slot of the day at 9am. That doesn’t matter too much, since his 9am is a no-show. One morning, he is accosted at the court by Anne (Stacy Martin from The Brutalist, Bradey Corbet, 2024; Amanda, Mikhaël Hers, 2018; Nymphomaniac Volumes I & II, Lars von Trier, 2013), who wants to book sessions for her seven-year-old son Anton (Dylan Torrell). When she won’t take no for an answer, Tom gives her one of the no-show slots.
It turns out that the boy, who has had a little coaching from his dad, is a good player. Moreover, he and Tom hit it off. At another lesson, he meets the boy’s father Dave (Jack Farthing from The Lost Daughter, Maggie Gyllenhaal, 2021: Burn Burn Burn, Chanya Button, 2015).
Talking to the couple later, he learns that they’re in an unsatisfactory room with a view of the rubbish bins that are noisily collected at 7am in the morning. Off his own bat, he arranges through Maria the desk clerk (Bruna Cusi from Summer 1993, Carla Simón, 2017) to get their room switched for a better one. Suddenly he’s their friend, and gets invited over for the evening. Anne is tired and goes to bed, so Dave gets Tom to take him out to the local night spot. Tom loses track of him at the Waikiki, and goes home.
However, the next morning, Dave is nowhere to be seen, and Ann and Tom find themselves in the middle of a missing persons case, quickly taken out of Jorge’s hands as a hotshot inspector from a nearby city comes in to take charge of the case…
Although this feels like a Patricia Highsmith story, with its slow but sure entrance of one character into the alien, dysfunctional lives of another family, it apparently came out of writer-director Gerster’s head. The dry, arid landscape surrounded by the clear blue sea is almost a character in itself. The evident aridity seems an apt description of both Tom and the family with whom he falls in, at least the couple – the son seems comparatively normal.
Riley is perfect as the dishevelled, non-establishment, British ex-pat whose appearance, like the aridity of the island, seems to describe his personal state. It’s a very different performance from what we’re used to seeing him do. The characters he plays (in, for instance, Widow Cliquot, Thomas Napper, 2023; Firebrand, Karim Ainouz, 2023; Control, Anton Corbijn, 2007) tend to have more of a buttoned-down quality.
Stacey Martin is nothing like that. There’s an ambiguity about her; when they first meet, it appears to be by chance, but you start to wonder if something else is going on. Have they perhaps met before? If so, was Tom out of it, and would he remember whatever might have taken place? Regardless, you get the impression that from that first meeting, he is being played, both by Ann and, later, by the vanished Dave (and, perhaps, by the pair of them as a couple).
Child actor Dylan Torrell is a remarkable find, giving a seemingly measured performance that occasionally erupts into tantrums when, for instance, his parents try to get him to attend the hotel’s junior club.
The title, referring to places cut off from each other and the mainland, might be describing the characters – the loner and the three family members, since they all appear to live in isolation from one another. However, as John Donne famously wrote, no man is an island.
There’s a mystery about the whole narrative, because whilst the story that’s playing out before our eyes is clear enough, a good deal more is going on beneath the film’s constantly shifting surface. If maybe a little too long at just over two hours, this nevertheless casts a spell over the viewer as it sucks him or her into its increasingly strange and often unpredictable web of relationships. An extraordinary work, a slow burner, and a must-see.
Islands is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, September 12th, and on BFI Player from Monday, October 27th.
Trailer: