As Sam Riley’s Tom wakes up face-down in the sand in what looks like the Sahara, audiences are in for a scorching, sun-frazzled Hitchcockian delight from German director Jan-Ole Gerster.
In fact it’s the Canary Islands, where Tom is a weary tennis coach at one of those mid-range, all-inclusive hotels. He's also got a booze habit (he hides his whisky bottle in his tennis ball tin), as well as a liking for dipping his nose in coke at local club Waikiki and shagging the tourists — hell, this guy rarely comes to consciousness in a bed, let alone his own home.
Despite Tom’s perma-hangover and disco-debauched, downbeat demeanour, the hotel guests and locals seem to like him – including the village cop (who waives Tom’s ticket for sleeping a session off in his car at a bus stop) and a Moroccan couple who run a camel trekking business.
Perhaps Tom’s popularity came following an on-court bet he won years earlier with unlikely hotel guest Rafa Nadal, after which everyone on the island calls him “Ace”. This incident reprises itself nicely in a later vignette.
Then Anne (Stacy Martin) checks in to the hotel with her chirpy, dickhead of a husband Dave (Jack Farting), who calls everyone “buddy” and “man”. They want tennis lessons for their seven-year-old son Anton (Dylan Torrell), which Tom duly obliges with.
However, soon good old Tom is also pulling strings to help the family find a better hotel room and then showing them around the island.
Is Tom just a salty old, salt of the earth human being, or is Anne really the one pulling all the holiday strings? She’s up to something, secretly touching Tom's back in a group photo, and her marriage clearly isn’t far off the rocks.
Following the sightseeing tour, Anne heads to bed early after a marital tiff in front of Tom, citing “too much sun” – to which Dave replies, “Or too much Dave more likely”. Of course Dave, being a class-A Brit abroad idiot, needs to get this slight out of his system, so drags Tom reluctantly off to Waikiki. Whereupon, everything goes holiday-from-hell belly-up.
Any more detail would spoil the pleasure, but what follows is an absolutely sizzling slow-burn of intrigue, with touches of Ripley and even Columbo murder mystery later on.
“Clues” are floated to us like sardines in the ocean, vanishing in a shimmer almost as soon as they appear. We get the gorgeous, plinky-plonky atmospheric soundtrack, plenty of Hitchcock-style clifftop moments and even the master’s iconic, vertiginous shot of the villain/heroine against the ominous sea spray.
However, Gerster manages to avoid any real pastiche and makes this much more his own moody European arthouse piece. And the man has a real left-field eye for spectacle, including a truly jaw-dropping scene with one of those camels.
Islands is in cinemas from September 12
