Islands review – sexual tension and dangerously polite encounters
This intriguing noir mystery with a twist in its tale sees a couple befriend a tennis coach at a holiday resort with unnerving results
German film-maker Jan-Ole Gerster has created an intriguing noir mystery starring Sam Riley and Stacy Martin. It has very good performances and witty visual ideas, but the dramatic shape and emotional focus could have been tightened and sharpened. Yet this is a smart film which pays its audience the compliment of assuming they are intelligent enough to work things out on their own in a drama of sexual tension and dangerously polite encounters, something like Jacques Deray’s The Swimming Pool or Paul Schrader’s The Comfort of Strangers.
Riley plays Tom, a tennis coach at a middling hotel resort in Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. He has been here for almost a decade, increasingly unhappy with his aimless, pointless life of no worries, no responsibilities, spending nights just boozing, doing drugs and having endless one-night stands with women. Tragically, he is nicknamed “Ace” because he once got to play briefly on the hotel court with Rafael Nadal and gossip has embellished that anecdote into a (fictional) glorious victory over the tennis legend in front of hundreds of onlookers. But Tom is now descending into alcoholism, always waking up hungover in his car, or on the beach, or by the pool with no memory of the night before.
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