The dangerous wish of wanting your life to have more purpose and drama than it really does in the driving force of Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands, a grounded character study that gradually turns into a mysterious noir less on the whims of its own plot and more via the desires of its characters to find a hidden meaning in their own life stories. It’s an intriguing and involving idea at first – a mystery that might only exist because the players involved wish it did – that starts strong but ends up, somewhat inevitably, meandering towards an anticlimax where the stakes might be more ‘hangovers and sunburn’ than ‘life and death’.
The central dissatisfaction comes from our ‘hero’ Tom (Sam Riley), a former tennis player who now, in a job he kinda should’ve aged out of by now, works as a coach for an all-inclusive hotel on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands, practising serves and rallies with his European guests and their kids. Bored and listless and frequently drunk (we never see him wake up in the same spot twice), he finds himself struck by a British family who book his services for their son and end up semi-adopting Tom into their deeply dysfunctional dynamics.
These are wife Anne (Stacy Martin) and husband Dave (Jack Farthing), the kind of pair to air their dirty laundry in public and around their kid, with Tom just becoming another prop they can passive-aggressively argue over, at least until Dave goes missing on the island after a drunken bender. Tom and Anne (and an inspector from the Spanish mainland) swiftly assume the worst, but the local cops advise that Dave is probably just shame-facedly hiding from the aftermath of a sleazy fling with a local or backpacker. As Tom and Anne scour the island, they each become convinced that something more grand and life-changing is happening, Tom especially starting to wonder if he’s met Anne before, with a hint in his mind that he might even be her son’s actual dad.
How actually real any of this is is kept very ambiguous, which gives Riley and Martin some really interesting notes to play – the entire plot essentially hinges on the interiority of their performances, communicating all these crucial beats in silence, and they both deliver. Riley might be at his career best here, haggard and sad yet completely charming; Tom is very well-liked not just by his coworkers at the hotel but by a large swathe of the island’s residents and it’s hard to resist feeling the same.
Fuerteventura itself is also great here, its caves, beaches, and dormant volcanoes always both inviting and eerie under the ceaseless sun, though the ominous score suggests an active menace that never really pops up in practice. In Riley and Martin’s company, this is a nice backdrop to spend a couple of hours in, the setting often making up for the fact that Islands runs too long and pretty much unravels in a final act that slinks off to nowhere in particular. Tom, by nature, is a man who runs in circles and always ends up back at square one – you just wish his eventual landing there had a bit more oomph.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 