Islands – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Jan-Ole Gerster
Writers – Jan-Ole Gerster, Blaz Kutin, Lawrie Doran
Stars – Sam Riley, Jack Farthing, Stacy Martin

Harry Belafonte (1927-2023) sang ‘This is my Island in the Sun’, capturing a whole sense of the sunny island as a paradise that has remained in the popular imagination through the decades – a place to escape to from the modern world.  The TV comedy, Benidorm (2007-18), that few admitted to loving but secretly did, captured the essence of, or the prejudice towards, a different type of sun-filled holiday, one of poolside cocktails and very British innuendo.  Further south, and yet still in Spain, the Canary Islands offer a not incomparable holiday with the added benefit of year-round sunshine.  A constant influx of tourists, week after week, day after day, arrive for a week or two of escape from the everyday, escaping to the Gay-infused vibe of Playa del Ingles or to the lunar-like landscapes of Tenerife and Fuerteventura.   It is hard to believe that this type of sun-soaked holiday only emerged in the 1960s.  Occasionally, some visitors remain on the island, unwilling to return to the grey skies of northern climes.  Many are retirees, and others are lost souls escaping themselves as much as the rainfall.

One such ‘escapee’ is the magnificently acted centre piece of this film.  Tom, an accomplished tennis coach, whiles away his days and life with desultory training sessions on court and evenings fuelled with clubbing, drinks and drugs,  living the life of a Magaluf-like teenager yet with middle age knocking on the door.  What is his past we never know?  This escapist life is then challenged by the arrival of a particular group of guests, who are just ever so slightly posh, and certainly too posh for the hotel complex in which they find themselves.  An unlikely friendship develops, and Tom sets off to show them the sights of Fuertenventura in all its breathtakingly stark beauty.  The husband of the couple is palpably obnoxious, and the emotional charge between Tom and his beautiful wife is immediately apparent.  This is all straightforward, after a fashion, until the husband goes missing and all suspicion falls on Tom and the wife.  If not quite edge-of-the-seat tension, it is certainly gripping.  Local security is accommodating, but not so the hard-hitting big cheese detective from the city who smells blood.   All the while, there is the complicating relationship with the wife, or was it a relationship in the drug-fuelled past, which has now come back to haunt him?

There are questions aplenty to keep the viewer engaged to the end.  But at a deeper level, there are further questions which may accompany the viewer afterwards.   There are questions on how suddenly our life trajectory can change at any moment and how, if ever, we can escape our past.  Islands in the sun are one thing, a paradise for some, but perhaps an open prison for others.