Islands review: Sam Riley stars in sun-soaked slow burner
If you’ve been reading this website for a while, you’ll know how I feel about ambiguity in films, so it’ll come as no surprise that I became infuriated with the slow-burning mystery Islands when I realised it wasn’t interested in answering my most burning questions.
The film stars Sam Riley as former tennis pro Tom, who now teaches classes to tourists at a holiday resort on Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. He becomes oddly close with a British family – Anne (Stacy Martin), Dave (Jack Farthing) and their son Anton (Dylan Torrell) – and finds himself caught in their web of secrets when Dave goes missing after a boozy night out.
Islands is a sun-soaked, slow-burning mystery with shades of Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith. Martin’s radiant Anne is an enigmatic femme fatale figure with a very apparent sexual desire for Tom. There is a tension between them, certainly once Dave is out of the picture, and the perennially single Tom temporarily tries being a husband and parent on for size.
I was utterly compelled by this dynamic, convinced of some history between the pair, but the film just teases us with little lines here and there and never confirms anything or confronts it head-on. There were a few conversations I couldn’t wait for, but they never came, because that would have ruined the ambiguity director Jan-Ole Gerster was aiming for. At some point towards the end, I became rather deflated with the realisation that my questions weren’t getting answered or even addressed in any sort of way.
Riley does well as the miserable and unfulfilled Tom, who regularly drinks himself into oblivion and wakes up hungover in a random place. It was interesting to explore what it must be like to live at a holiday destination all year round. People assume it’s idyllic, but it doesn’t necessarily fix your problems. As the saying goes: “Wherever you go, there you are.” Martin is radiant and captivating, and Farthing is well cast as her douchebag husband.
While I loved the concept, the intrigue and the unique film location of the dusty Fuerteventura, Islands was too subtle and vague to truly satisfy. What did it all mean?! Who knows.
In cinemas from Friday 12th September