German director Jan-Ole Gerster’s mesmerizing, mostly English-language “Islands” opens with a scene that for many would mark “rock bottom” — reason to check oneself into rehab — as Sam Riley’s Tom awakens in a field of sand dunes. He could have been dropped from heaven or belched up from below, but most likely just passed out … again. The camera pans left, and there in the distance is the luxury hotel, big as a cruise ship, where Tom works as a tennis coach for visiting tourists. But mostly, Tom has been living a life of revelry without responsibility, sleeping wherever he can.
Over the course of a lean but revealing film of unexpected existential heft, we witness his wake-up call, as a family of three arrives in Fuerteventura, the largest of the Canary Islands, and gives Tom reason to reassess his life choices. Right from the start, there’s a neo-noir like feel to Gerster’s suspenseful portrait, accentuated by its atonal and slightly disconcerting score. Tom’s shaggy, solitary introduction recalls films such as “Harper” and “The Long Goodbye,” in which a disheveled (and possibly hungover) detective stumbles through his morning routine — a role for which Riley proves entirely convincing.
But there’s also a much deeper malaise at work, like something out of an Antonioni movie. Tom was once an exceptional tennis player — the locals still talk of a legendary bet he won against Spanish champ Rafael Nadal — but he’s been coasting on Fuerteventura ever since. Gerster and co-writers Blaž Kutin and Lawrie Doran give us just enough details to construct a picture of someone who goes with the flow, doing drugs when offered, falling into bed with the revolving door of young visitors and showing up late to his morning lessons, just sober enough to repeat the routine. He’s the sort of guy who’ll tell you he’s living the dream, but when pressed, might admit that it’s hollow and unfulfilling.
Anne Murphy is just the person to press him. As played by Stacy Martin, the blond and alluringly refined woman seems to have her own life figured out, impressing Tom when she arranges tennis lessons for her 8-year-old son, Anton (Dylan Torrell). As the film unfolds, however, we learn that she’s just improvising as well. There’s no question that Anne and her husband, Dave (Jack Farthing), are wealthy, but are they satisfied? Of all the posh vacation destinations they might have chosen, why did Anne pick this one? And why, through certain looks and subtle gestures, do we get the impression that she and Tom have crossed paths before — likely in this very place?
The possibility that Anton could, if Tom’s mental calculations are correct, be his son is enough to shake him from his comfortable but inconsequential existence. There’s zero indication that he’s looking for a more meaningful romantic relationship with a woman, or waiting for the right one to come along. No-strings encounters suit him fine. But meeting this boy, who could be his, awakens something in him: the notion of legacy, perhaps (as in Clint Bentley’s “Jockey” a few years earlier), that a young tennis prodigy with his potential could go farther than he did in the sport.
Tom is booked solid all week, but Gerster shows him canceling classes and making time for the Murphys, upgrading them to a better room and offering personal tours of the island’s most beautiful beaches. Through it all, a seductive energy passes between him and Anne, while her oblivious douchebag of a husband reveals himself to be unworthy. After a late-night drinking binge, Dave disappears, but not before making clear that he feels trapped by his family — which strikes Tom as strange, since it’s easy to see that he’s imagining what his life might be like in Dave’s shoes.
What follows unspools like a low-key thriller, something just psychosexual enough for Patricia Highsmith to have written, as Anne quickly becomes the lead suspect in whatever may have happened to her husband. Tom blacked out that night too, as usual, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t involved. The police start to complicate things, so Tom pulls a few strings (an earlier scene shows the cops are accustomed to cleaning up after him), but in the ambiguous gulf of unspoken communication between him and Anne, audiences are free to read whatever they want — until at last, something surprising to Tom (but not so much to Anne) forces him to make a decision about the direction he wants his life to take from here.
In Fuerteventura, Gerster has found the perfect setting for his personal “L’Avventura”: a piercing look into a handful of modern lives so alienated from one another (even their own spouses) that they feel like islands unto themselves. Taking maximum advantage of the ultra-wide Cinemascope aspect ratio to drive that idea home, Gerster’s film isn’t nearly so oblique or inscrutable as the Italian master’s, though it leaves plenty up to interpretation and proves wonderfully open-ended. Turns out, this journey isn’t about the outcome so much as finding the will to overcome the inertia that holds us in place.
