Islands explores an endless summer filled with existential dread
- Kazdyn Pierce
- Mar 17
- 3 min read
Islands is a German drama/thriller from director Jan-Ole Gerster that follows Tom (Sam Riley), a tennis instructor who lives a permanent vacation on a tropical resort as a tennis coach in the Canary Islands of Spain. Settling down and learning Spanish, Tom halfheartedly teaches tennis by day and parties with a revolving door of tourists by night, often waking up in various spots around the island. When he is approached by attractive tourist mother Anne (Stacy Martin), inquiring about lessons for her son Anton, he is sucked into their family dynamic when he offers to show them around the island as well. He meets Anton’s father Dave (Jack Farthig) and after being pressured into a long night of partying and laying witness to some uncomfortable family dynamics, Dave never returns in the morning. This leaves Tom and Anne on a tense search for the absent father, all while Tom is grappling with his mounting feelings towards Anne and his place, both on the islands and in the greater world.
The best way to describe Islands is dreamy. It is a hazy float through a world of endless recreation, beautiful beaches, and luxury resorts. It juxtaposes this with mounting feelings of confusion, dread, and tension. Every technical aspect is married nicely to this vision. The sound design is ethereal, the cinematography is often bright and disorienting like you are waking up with a hangover, and the set design is brilliant, constantly playing with a tense environment in a beautiful physical location.
Ultimately, it is a character study, and it poses the question of purpose. Tom clearly is on the islands because he seeks to escape from his mounting reality of failure. A tennis prodigy who is locally famous for besting Rafael Nadal once, Tom is the definition of stuck. He is aging and wasting away in a liminal space, but he is slowly realizing he cannot run from life just by being somewhere people go to hide. Anne and Dave are using the island as a break, a reprieve from a forced and failing marriage, and are also seeking identity like Tom. Are they settled as young parents and husband and wife? Do they yearn for something they feel like got away from them and can they find it here in this beautiful paradise? Every character is dealing with this to a degree and even the side characters are well thought out and mean something to the story. From the local cop to the front desk clerk at the hotel, every piece of this film feels alive and tactile.
While the plot moves along nice and dreamily, it can feel very slow at times. Life on the island is meandering, and they invoke this quite a bit. I do think there is utility in the slow moments of the film, watching Tom volley the ball with Anton, watching him stumble dance around a packed club with no social interaction. It shows the place where he is at in life and it deeply characterizes him at the same time. However, these moments can feel stretched out and tension breaking many times, particularly in the middle act.
Islands is light on typical horror. It isn’t going to jump out and scare you or make you look at anything you don't want to see. However, it is existentially and socially horrifying. Some of the situations the viewer sees people in force them to reflect on their own existence. Are you running from anything? Are you stuck in the mud when you could be racing ahead? Islands makes the mundane decisions of life and our running mortality clock the antagonist, and it works so well because most of the time, these are the scariest things we can face. Islands is incredibly unique and captivating and you can watch it on demand now.
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