Islands
Tom was a promising tennis player, but time has dulled that spark. Now he lives in Fuerteventura, where he teaches at a resort: tourist clients who come and go, monotonous days, a void filled with alcohol, nights lost to fleeting encounters. The “eternal summer” that surrounds him is an apparent paradise. Then a different family arrives: Anne, her husband Dave, and their son Anton. They are not the usual time-wasters of the resort. Tom, drawn to Anne and intrigued by this dissonance, guides them to the authentic corners of the island, bonds with Anton, and suggests a life off the tourist paths. But when Dave disappears, everything changes: Anne behaves in ways that seem suspicious, the emptiness around Tom grows deafening, becoming his reality. He begins a personal investigation, filled with questions left hanging and truths that seem like fragments never fully graspable.
Woman: an endless, beautiful mystery.
Guido Gozzano
Guido Gozzano
Islands is not just a thriller set under the sun, nor a conventional whodunit: it is rather an essay on disorientation, the desire to escape, and the illusion of freedom. Gerster uses the natural beauty and the seemingly calm air of the island as a distorting mirror: what appears to be a refuge gradually becomes a limbo, a state where time stagnates, where consciousness grows dim.
Tom is a neutral figure in the sense that he no longer knows what he truly wants. He has no ambitions—or perhaps he has lost them: he neither acts nor reacts to the presences around him. Tom is the “human non-place,” someone who lives among others but is part of none. His escape—initially perceived as a desire for freedom—becomes an inner prison: caught between boredom, regret, and estrangement.
The most mysterious figure remains Anne (Stacy Martin). It is never clear whether she is hiding a past, a trauma, or simply a plan; even during the investigation into her husband’s disappearance, she maintains an impenetrable aura. She neither gives herself away nor explains: she seems suspended in a puzzle that she does not want or cannot reveal.
Anne appears as a modern Amazon: she uses the male, bends him to her desires, lets him go when no longer needed. Like mythological figures who used men instrumentally—never emotionally or communally, only to procreate and then abandon them—she too acts driven by a feral instinct, more animal than human. Although her appearance is elegant and aloof, her body and face conceal the mystery of her ends, justified by any means.
Empathy does not vibrate within her; there is no authentic affection for those around her—not even for her son. Anton, though he seems to represent an emotional bond, is treated as an extension, not an autonomous subject. Her sensitivity is cold, almost predatory: she scents the situation, moves swiftly, does not linger, knows no waiting. Anne embodies a complex instinct that is sophisticated yet disenchanted.
Dave, the missing husband, represents the bourgeois normality that Anne seems to reject and that Tom has abandoned. Anton, on the other hand, carries the innocence of a child but also becomes a tragic mirror of maternal indifference: his presence is an unanswered question, a call to the feeling that Anne does not possess.
Gerster does not rely on spectacular plot twists: the pace is slow, the tension silent. The direction focuses on spaces and waits, on gazes that linger, silences that weigh. The landscape becomes a character: the island is not just a setting but a condition of the soul. The illusion of paradise, giving way to intense heat, penetrating dust, and the weight of inactivity, is one of the film’s most successful themes.
The soundtrack, framing, and contrast between blinding light and urban/human shadows enhance this suspended atmosphere. Gerster does not aim to explain everything, allowing the mystery to remain as such, as if life itself were often this tangle of unfulfilled desires, of possibilities never realized.
On an existential level, Islands suggests that escape is rarely external, but rather internal: in the repetition of choices, in the capacity—or incapacity—to embrace one’s void, one’s limits. Tom does not flee the resort and the sun: he flees himself.
Anne, by contrast, embodies the dark side of the survival instinct: naked instinct, devoid of love, supplanting all human bonds. She does not seek truth or redemption: she pursues only her own trajectory, like an animal that scents and moves without hesitation. If Tom represents the dissolution of will, Anne is its polarity: pure will, yet devoid of compassion.
On the surface, the film might deceive: it appears as a linear narrative, a tourist-beach story disguised as a psychological thriller. In reality, behind the veneer of apparent banality and the false mainstream packaging lies a work that continues to question. Islands harbors a subtly layered aura, an existential tension that works silently, probing the folds of its characters and revealing their most ambiguous and fragile dimensions. What might seem merely entertaining reveals itself as a profound inquiry into being, the opacity of intentions, the enigma of the other, and the void within us. It is precisely in this gap—between accessible surface and unexpected depth—that Gerster’s film finds its most unsettling strength.
Instinct dictates duty, and intelligence provides the pretext to elude it.
Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust