RIGA IFF: Salas

Jan-Ole Gerster
Islands
Islands
DE
2025, 123’, en, es
Age 16+

 

Tom is perfectly aware that his life is a string of bad TV clichés. He spends half his day coaching tennis at a four-star hotel, and the other half he doesn't remember, as he escapes into drinking and all sorts of intoxication. A while ago he was a tennis prodigy who once faced Rafael Nadal, but now Tom does his best to blend in with the hotel staff. Until the moment when he encounters a British family – the platinum blonde Anna straight out of a Hitchcock film, her husband Dave, and their young son Anton. Tom becomes Anton’s coach, grows closer to Anna, and begins to see a chance to escape the palm-fringed hell he’s created for himself…

 

If Antonioni had wanted to shoot L’Avventura (1960) in the Canary Islands and with a camel making an appearance, it would have looked very much like this sun-drenched, tennis-court noir by German auteur Gerster. Screened at the Berlinale, the film’s script winds like a scenic mountain road, deliberately disorienting and utterly captivating – a love triangle, played by a thoroughly modern trio that seems to have stepped straight out of the best 1950s thrillers: Sam Riley (Control (2007)), Stacy Martin (Nymphomaniac (2013)), and Jack Farthing (The Crown (2016–2023)). Gerster dissects not only cinematic iconography amid the picturesque tourist idyll of Lanzarote – but also the millennial generation, their life choices and expectations: what are they searching for today, and does comparing yourself to others lead to identity puzzles and the temptation to borrow someone else’s life?