Sam Riley stars as Tom, a washed-up tennis-pro-turned-coach at a luxury island hotel on the Canary Islands, in Islands, the English-language debut of A Coffee in Berlin director Jan-Ole Gerster. He is the protagonist, but we know little about a man seems to avoid any sort of introspection; living night by night, Tom takes a swig of a stashed bottle of something (tequila? vodka? rum?) between the training sessions he is so obviously bored by. He shows up late to work, coffee from the buffet in-hand, and hopes to skip a class whenever possible. It’s a life of leisure, in some ways, but most of the mornings he wakes up hungover from a crazy party out with that week’s tourists. Yet it doesn’t take long before he notices a rather beautiful blonde woman getting off the shuttle bus, or when she notices him too.
Anne (Stacy Martin in a perfect mix of virtuous and cunning) approaches Tom requesting private lessons for her seven-year-old son Anton (Dylan Torrell). Tom first refuses, but after Anne bats her eyelashes at him and offers a double fee, he has no choice but to say yes. Things get weird when Anne’s husband Dave (Jack Farthing) comes over––their passive-aggressive quips at one another are very telling from the get-go while lack of decorum concealing it screams trouble. Yet Tom is drawn to them––or at least to the feeling of being liked by them––to the point where he bails on work to drive them across the island and share a drink at their hotel balcony. Gerster, co-writing the screenplay with Blaž Kutin and Lawrie Doran, knows which buttons to press to give a neo-noir feel to this sun-drenched film. The audience has no choice but to wonder what will go wrong, and when.
On the one hand, the film works in subtle ways by enlarging the gap between polite helpers and people in need; the way Tom devotes himself to the Maguire family is puzzling for everyone around him while he remains oblivious. “Are you their tour guide now?” is a valid question, but he brushes it off; in his willingness to accommodate a violation of professional boundaries one can spot Tom’s own insecurity, his loneliness, and desperate desire to be liked and useful again. In a throwaway conversation we learn that Tom once beat Rafael Nadal in a match, but that sounds like ancient history. While Riley’s acting presents as aloof, his character is struggling à la the Ian Curtis he played in Anton Corbijn’s Control.
When Islands veers into restrained-thriller territory, mood holds up while the script doesn’t. However much Martin and Riley try, they just aren’t as convincing as a “will-they-won’t-they” onscreen couple, she being a much more dominating role than Riley’s Tom is able to submit to. A slight misfit nonetheless, but it does make a difference when the film implies there’s a more complex situation echoing from the past into the present. Dave goes missing, Anne is suspiciously chill about it, and Tom just can’t keep away from her––a love triangle perhaps? Maybe, but this is not the question Islands wants you to ask. The film works best if you surrender to its moods and vibes (and the gorgeous score by Dascha Dauenhauer) with the ocean, cliffs, and beaches of the Canary Islands at an arm’s length. Though there’s also the volcano on Lanzarote––a very obvious metaphor here, but why not––its smoke doesn’t necessarily mean fire, par for the course with Islands.
Islands premiered at the 2025 Berlinale.