Vague Visages’ Islands review contains minor spoilers. Jan-Ole Gerster’s 2025 movie features Jack Farthing, Stacy Martin and Sam Riley. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

The year 2025 finally gets its sexy summer tennis film thanks to Jan-Ole Gerster’s Islands. But while the love triangle story climaxes with an exhilarating tennis sequence, the film is actually less reminiscent of Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers (2024) than Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 novel Under the Volcano — the tale of an Englishman in a foreign land, watching his glory days through a haze of heat and alcohol. 

In Islands, the man in question is Tom (Sam Riley), a one-time tennis pro whose career was derailed by injuries long ago. Now, the protagonist makes his living coaching hotel guests at a holiday resort in Fuerteventura, one of Spain’s Canary Islands. Tom is a perpetually scruffy figure, wandering from the court to bars in shorts, a t-shirt and a pair of hangover-hiding shades. And yet there’s something gentlemanly about him, as there’s a kind elegance in the way he interacts with people (or maybe his English accent makes it seem that way). 

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Whatever it is, everyone seems to like Tom. The locals call him “Ace” and love to regale newcomers with tall tales of what a player the former tennis pro used to be. The guest coaches are always happy to buy Tom a beer after practice,  and everybody seems eager to do him a favor, from club bouncers and hotel clerks to Jorge (Pep Ambròs) — the cop who looks the other way whenever he finds the protagonist passed out in a truck. Everyone seems to like Tom, and Riley’s quietly affable performance in the lead role will surely resonate with audiences.

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All in all, it’s a pretty good life that Tom lives, and Islands does an incredible job of drawing viewers into the sunny corner of the world that the protagonist carved out for himself. Even as the film highlights tourism, Juan Sarmiento G.’s cinematography makes Fuerteventura feel like a slice of paradise; a place where every day seems to be bathed in golden sunlight, and every evening washes the island in cool cerulean. Gerster occasionally uses a painterly wide shot, but he’s never too indulgent with them, and Islands moves at a pace that’s both suitably languid for a hot location and efficient enough to effortlessly hold the audience’s attention.

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The lush orchestral score of Dascha Dauenhauer complements Island’s rich visuals by conjuring an old-fashioned sense of melancholy romance. The composer creates a precise feeling, like when the sun fades during a beautiful evening and the sense of an ending creeps in. In Islands, Tom’s life is beautiful but also very lonely, at least until Anne (Stacy Martin) arrives.  

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Anne appears one day with her tennis-loving son, Anton (Dylan Torrell), and insufferable husband, Dave (Jack Farthing). While Tom initially gives the kid a few lessons, he soon finds himself pulled into the very middle of the boy’s family. And this isn’t a very pleasant place to be, since Anne and Dave’s relationship is viscerally unpleasant, with Islands ably capturing the special hell of being sat at a table with a couple who can’t even pretend to like each other anymore. With a plastic grin, Dave constantly insults Anne, who fights back but only to a degree, clearly too tired to fully stand up for herself or walk away. The couples’ broken relationship seems all the worse in comparison to the rare moments when Tom and Anne are alone, all of which thrum with an unspoken sensuality. 

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It’s a bad situation all round, and it gets a lot worse when Dave suddenly disappears. At this point, Dauenhauer’s score takes on the teasing, sinister tone of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller. And it turns out that the beautiful Anne might not be quite what she seems. Facts and identities seem to blur under the island’s too-hot sun, and Tom finds himself stumbling deeper into a mystery that he doesn’t understand, increasingly unsure of who he can trust. 

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Islands smoothly makes the transition from a romantic drama to an understated thriller, and it’s utterly intoxicating.

Ross McIndoe (@OneBigWiggle) is a freelance writer based in Glasgow. Other bylines include The Skinny, Film School Rejects and Bright Wall/Dark Room.

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