★★★ (3 out of 4)
A hungover tennis pro (Sam Riley) wakes up on a shimmering beach in “Islands,” now in theaters, the best place to get lost among strangers as the film casts its darkly seductive net. Riley plays sad-eyed, raspy Tom, once a tennis prodigy but currently reduced to teaching tourists how to hold a racket at a faux-luxury resort in Fuerteventura, the largest of the Canary Islands.
Easy living and easier sex sit well on Tom, except for the creases around his eyes that suggest this beautiful disaster, who once played Spanish champ Rafael Nadal, surely had bigger dreams. And Riley, still best known for playing Joy Division’s suicidal rocker Ian Curtis in 2007’s “Control,” brings a nicely sustained film noir aura to his role.
“Islands,” from German director Jan-Ole Gerster (“A Coffee in Berlin”) and writers Blaž Kutin and Lawrie Doran, wisely resists stating the obvious. It expects us to notice what’s going on in the space between words.
You’ll be spellbound by the film’s provocations. They may just keep you up nights.
And then one day, Tom stops drowning in his dreams. An entitled family of tourists arrives at the resort. Nothing dramatic there. Just casually slinky Anne Murphy (the excellent Stacy Martin of “The Brutalist”) stopping by to arrange tennis lessons for her 8-year-old son, Anton (Dylan Torrell). Anne’s husband, Dave (Jack Farthing), has the rich jerk look and attitude down pat. But Tom, who doesn’t do such things, agrees to show the family around the island. He really likes the kid.
What’s going on? Plenty. For starters, we get the feeling that Tom and Anne have a connection they’re not mentioning or don’t want to bring up. Anne says she did a stint as a soap opera actor, so everyone thinks they know her. Are you buying that? Me neither.
And why does Anne mention Dave’s infertility diagnosis? Watch everyone’s faces when Tom takes a seemingly innocuous beach photo of this tourist family. The tension, heightened by the pulsating score from Dascha Dauenhauer, is palpable.
And then comes an inciting incident. Dave suddenly disappears. A search is started. The police question Anne, now looking every inch the femme fatale. The vibe here is very “L’Avventura,” the 1960 classic from Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni built around a similar search on an island. Like Antonioni, Gerster builds his story around mood, deliberate pacing, visual composition, and the always popular existential malaise—all captured by camera master Juan Sarmiento.
Gerster borrows from another master, Alfred Hitchcock, with a larcenous tilt toward such landmarks as “Vertigo” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Both films focus less on suspense than on the mystery of relationships and the loneliness at their core. Tom can relate.
I’m not suggesting that “Islands” ranks with those cinema landmarks. That kind of artistry eludes Gerster and, to be fair, most other filmmakers. But what “Islands” has, besides two haunted and haunting performances from Riley and Martin, is a technique placed in service of searching out the violence of the mind.
You may not exit “Islands” with answers to all the questions swimming in your head, but you will leave spellbound by the film’s provocations. They may just keep you up nights.