‘Islands’ Review: In Jan-Ole Gerster’s Neo-Noir Mystery, Paradise Feels Like a Dead End

Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands follows Tom (Sam Riley), a former tennis prodigy who works as a coach at a resort in Fuerteventura in Spain’s Canary Islands. A walking cliché that Riley memorably imbues with a lived-in sense of history, Tom spends his nights partying and his days hair-of-the-dogging. The film, based on a story by Gerster, is at its most hypnotic when we’re simply observing Tom going about his day job, lethargically hitting tennis balls, mumbling out rote instructions, or pushing his ball cart past other resort employees who, as evidenced by their hangdog appearance, clearly have troubled lives of their own.

Often captured in carefully centered compositions, Tom is stuck in an existential limbo. The listlessness of his existence would seem to be abetted by the liminality of the film’s setting. The second largest of the Canary Islands, Fuerteventura is renowned for its other-worldly sand dunes, and Islands opens with a hungover Tom waking up on one. Day in and day out, tourists from all over enter Tom’s life for a brief moment before they return to their regular lives.

The local club in the town of Corralejo that Tom frequents is Waikiki, whose name one character holds up (a bit too pointedly) as an example of how, even in a remote beach paradise like Fuerteventura, people want to pretend to be somewhere else. In one oddball moment, a camel from the farm owned by Tom’s friends, Raik (Ahmed Boulane) and Amina (Fatima Adoum), is seen walking the streets, suggesting a figment of a drugged-out imagination.

Tom is woken up from his torpor by the arrival of Anne (Stacy Martin) and Dave (Jack Farthing) at the resort. Anne has an almost ineffable pull on Tom, and after he begins to instruct her son, Anton (Dylan Torrell), our protagonist is increasingly drawn to her. He bends his schedule for them, and asks for favors from his coworker to improve their stay at the resort. But it’s more than just mere infatuation that pulls Tom into Anne’s orbit. Soon the script, by Gerster, Blaz Kutin, and Lawrie Doran, begins teasing the possibility that Tom is connected to this vacationing family in a way that would upend his world, and the film gets a lot of mileage from our wrapping our heads around that possibility alongside Tom.

All the details tied to Tom and Anne possibly having met before coalesce into something resembling a conventional plot. After Dave goes missing after Tom takes him to the Waikiki club, Islands veers into neo-noir terrain, with an investigation launched into Dave’s disappearance and Anne, whose behavior oscillates between extreme concern and happy-go-lucky apathy, emerging as a kind of femme fatale. But the film is far more interesting when it’s keyed to Tom’s existential malaise across what plays out like a White Lotus B-plot.

The investigation into Dave’s disappearance wraps up before it even begins with an intentional sense of anti-climax. The film, which suggests a series of boxes that (mostly) never get opened, is subtly attuned to the degrees of classism among the main characters, and it’s interesting that whatever closeness Tom begins to believe exists between him and Anne is completely disrupted by the outcome of the investigation. But after a certain point it just feels like the film’s low-key crime-movie elements only exist to push Tom toward a decidedly unearned epiphany: that he has to grow up. By then, it may feel as if his own apathy has been offloaded onto you.