Movie Review: ISLANDS

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: January 30th, 2026 / 09:39 PM

ISLANDS movie poster | ©2026 Greenwich Entertainment

Rating: Not Rated
Stars: Sam Riley, Stacy Martin, Jack Farthing, Pep Ambròs, Bruna Cusí, Ramiro Blas, Dylan Torrell, Ahmed Boulane, Fatima Adoum
Writers: Jan-Ole Gerster & Blaž Kutin & Lawrie Doran, story by Jan-Ole Gerster
Director: Jan-Ole Gerster
Distributor: Greenwich Entertainment
Release Date: January 30, 2026

ISLANDS actually takes place on one island, in the Spanish Canary Islands, although since its main characters are English, perhaps the title includes the U.K. as well.

Tom (Sam Riley) is an English ex-pat tennis coach at a large beachside hotel. We first meet him lying facedown in a sand dune. He wakes up, gets into his truck and drives to his job.

Despite the perks of his gig, including attractive and frisky women students, Tom is bored and lonely. He has a few friends, including police officer Jorge (Pep Ambròs) and camel farmers Raik (Ahmed Boulane) and Amina (Fatima Adoum), and puts a brave face on things, but it’s clear Tom is in need of direction.

Then Tom is approached by Anne Maguire (Stacy Martin), a British guest at the hotel, who says her husband Dave (Jack Farthing) insists on private tennis lessons for their seven-year-old son Anton (Dylan Torrell). Anton is enthusiastic and has some actual talent at tennis, and both Anne and Dave are eager to socialize with Tom.

After a little hesitation, Tom finds himself happy to spend time with the family, even blowing off a day’s work to play tour guide for them. It doesn’t take much time to see that there are tensions between Anne and Dave, but who wants what from whom, and what are they willing to do to get it?

Then there’s a dramatic incident and a police investigation.

Directed by Jan-Ole Gerster and written by Gerster & Blaž Kutin & Lawrie Doran from Gerster’s original story, ISLANDS puts a deadpan but playful face on the whole thriller business. No matter what else is happening, life goes on.

Part of this has some results for Tom that are more common to real life than to cinematic antiheroes. Tom isn’t painted as someone who’s especially introspective – we can see that he’s going through an existential crisis, but he doesn’t seem to realize this himself.

It’s as if proximity to the Maguires gives Tom permission to have emotions, even if the main ones are confusion and concern. Riley helps us empathize with Tom’s forlorn condition, even though it looks like he could have a more fulfilling life if he’d give it half a chance.

Martin is suitably enigmatic and Farthing is credibly unpredictable. Torrell is amiable and natural and Ramiro Blas projects shrewdness as the police inspector who comes into town to handle a case that goes through several phases.

It’s unclear if ISLANDS is trying to make a statement about people always wishing they were somewhere else, no matter where they are. There’s a line of dialogue to that effect (there’s a bar called the Waikiki, although we’re very far away from Hawai’i), but most of what we see of the island isn’t as idyllic as the tourists insist.

While the cliffs are impressive, the hotel seen at a distance looks like a big rectangle deposited in a large sandbox, and the modern exterior doesn’t match the narrow, old-fashioned hallways. We can’t tell if this is intended as irony and another level of disorientation, or if it’s a budgetary/location issue.

In any event, ISLANDS takes us on a journey we don’t expect from the set-up. As explorations of quiet desperation go, it’s livelier than many.

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Deliberately-paced but intriguing quasi-thriller

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