A sunbathing dream noir that takes place as a cursing seductive mixed doubles between Patricia Highsmith and the lead role of ”Challengers“Jan-Ole Gerters’s”Islands“Confronting his protagonist with a question that most people would probably kill for the chance to answer for themselves: when your life is a permanent holiday, where do you go to flee from it?
We never really Discover what empty (an amazingly dislocated Sam Riley) ran from when he decided to unpack his ambition and serve the rest of his days as a tennis professional at a Chichi resort somewhere just west of Morocco (Canary Island Fuerteventura provides an ominous and atmospheric performance that filmNot named attitude), but it is clear from the beginning that he hit a dead end. The surreal opening scene turns out an indication of how our man tends to start most of his days, like Tom – Hungover like hell, his lips a blister in the early morning sun – wakes up on a sand dun in the desert just outside the city without any recollection about How he got there. The flashing look of surprise on Tom’s face believes the fact that he routinely swings from a hidden bottle in the hotel’s equipment cabinets during his shifts before he hit the trashy local bar scene as soon as he gets off the clock.
Not because “Ace” gives the resort guests something to complain about; Tom is never messy at work, and aura of “nothing is important” that he radiates with every shown and rally just contributes to being on vacation. He is good with the children, he makes his male clientele feel that they have found a cool new Wingman (especially when they learn that Rafael Nadal once struggled to return Tom’s serving), and he gives women a non-threatening imagination to Enjoy from the other side of the net – although he is completely willing to step over the line if someone encounters him at the local nightclub and offers to buy a game of shot.
These different aspects of Tom’s appeal will all play when a dangerously idyllic young family arrives at the resort – the type whose telegenic beauty would almost feel wasted if it was not used to hide an ugly secret of any kind. The mother is a Steely former soap operator named Anne (Stacy Martin, sublime as a woman who always seems like she would just try to be a femme fatale); Tom has never been much of a TV viewer, but he feels he has seen Anne before.
Her smile Obstreperous husband Dave (an excellent jack farthing) is equal parts Hugh Grant and Tim Roth, and he radiates that kind of “what might be wrong?” Transfer specifically for well -heeled men in crisis. A strange phenomenon: millions of people vape in real life, but when a marginal different character, it makes it in a movie it codifies them immediately as a blistering asshole. Anyway, when Anne and Dave force their young son Anton (Dylan Torrell) into a lesson with the hotel’s Raspy-voted tennis professional, sparking the arrangement a strange and immediate tension between the adults. That voltage is of course anchored in desire, but that desire is from a more indeterminable type of unpublished; When Dave disappears after a drunken boy night at the club, what is missing from Tom and Anne’s life suddenly like it is just in front of them, mouth open, ready to swallow them all.
Co -written with Lawrie Doran and Blaž Kutin, Gersters clear dream of a script much of his power from the connection between the frivolity of the holiday and the severity of Dave’s mysterious disappearance. Going somewhere on holiday is to get into a limal space along the border that goes between imagination and real life (Dave and Anne stay in room 555, a number of permeated in cinematic fakeness), and the greatest luxury provided by any good resort is the illusion That nothing of the consequence can happen anywhere during their stay.
This is perhaps why Anne seems strangely unpleasant that her husband has gone Awol, even after the authorities start asking questions (someone with even a basic knowledge of Spanish will be able to follow the long conversations between Tom and the local police chief, but the choice for Leave the dialogue that is not signed still to a creeping sense of disorientation). Tom is too busy filling in as Anton’s replacement father to ask some own questions, but his gradually in -depth intrase with the family to a missing guest seems to be contrary to the deliberate limbarity in his own existence; Cosplaying as a father and getting involved in a potential murder case is exactly the kind of efforts he tried to escape from when he abandoned his promising life on earth in favor of an insane job in paradise.
“It’s like going back in time,” says Dave as he stares into the darkness of the island’s ancient cave formations, and that feeling echoes in the holes in this movie long after he disappeared from it. Runaway camels and primordial volcanic cookies make for clumsy attempts at literary symbolism, but such details -in combination with a tourist culture that seems frozen in the 80s, and a dascha Dauenhauer point that is rooted in classic noir -contributes to the feeling of a place which is not constant in time.
But the past has a fun way to repeat yourself, and it often does it in the form of an alternative gift. The more enclosed Tom becomes with Anne and Anton, the more he is forced to count on the road that is not taken. Exciting when the mystery of Dave’s absence becomes, and knotted when Anne’s bloodless attraction becomes in his absence, maintained “islands” in the end of the narrow but gripping rally that develops between what is and what may have been.
The certification of Gerster’s direction against intuitively deepens the draw of a film that thrives in the conditional tension, until the question of what happened to Dave – and the danger implicit in the possibility of his death – begins to be subject to the danger implicit in the possibilities of Tom’s life. Running away from things is the simple part, it lives with the choices you make that can kill you.
Hypnotic from beginning to end and unexpectedly hopeful for a movie with so much arsenic in its blood, “islands” knows that even the biggest holidays can never compete with the benefits of promoting a reality you actually lack to return to when it’s over.
Rating: B+
“Icelands” premiered at 2025 Berlin International Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
Want to keep you updated on IndieWire’s movie Reviews And critical thoughts? Subscribe here To our recently launched newsletter, in review by David Ehrlich, where our main film critic and Head Review’s editor rounds off the best new reviews and streaming choices along with some exclusive Musings – all only available for subscribers.
