Islands and the hell of tennis.

There's just something about tennis. So sweaty, so fast, so loud, so surprisingly loud. Last year, Luca Guadagnino reignited cinematic interest in the sport with Challengers: a movie asking, 'What if we dedicated our entire lives to this thing just to hide our carnal thirst for each other?' One thinks back to Strangers on a Train, which sublimated the rhythm of the sport into sickening horror with one of Hitchcock's most effective single shots. There's just something about tennis which seems to always, in the movies at least, have profoundly sexual connotations. A one-on-one grudge match to the death, while everyone else watches - sounds steamy already. What happens, though, when the tennis stops feeling like tennis, when it's become monotonous, stale, asexual? A job? It would probably feel like you were trapped on an island.

Tom (Sam Riley) is a bit of a slob. After a career-ending injury left him unable to go pro, he finds himself on a holiday resort teaching tennis to young and eager hopefuls, or people who fancy thwacking a ball while getting a tan. He's struggling to find the point in it all, besides the alcohol, the dancing (which he claims he doesn't do), and the frequent one-night stands. Suddenly, in comes Anne (Stacy Martin), Dave (Jack Farthing), and their son, paying extra for private lessons, whispering, staring, just acting a little strange, and way too personable. Anne especially is a cartoonish seductress, even in front of her husband. Then Dave goes missing. Tom is dragged into a potential murder investigation with the woman who could potentially mean the end of the monotony, and is forced into making sense of his life in this supposed eternal paradise.

Sense of it he does try to make, though the island remains bewildering. Between the runaway camel, the woman keying hipster surfer girls' trucks, and the detective too excited for a murder, this seems like an odd artefact of a location to visit once and never return to. Trouble is, Tom lives here, and it shows. Riley plays him doe-eyed, often staring off into the distance, rarely in frame. His body exudes the confidence of a supposed tennis pro, but he's reserved, slightly hunched over, rejecting advances, unless drunk, of course. It's a powerhouse of a central performance, at once the most pathetic and the most interesting guy in the room, a man it makes sense Anne would be intrigued by, as he himself downplays, while also being the one everyone overlooks as a long-term partner. He doesn't just live in a holiday; he is the holiday - a part of the all-inclusive package deal.

Jan-Ole Gerster's horrifying tale of impossible need is at its very best when the holiday feeling that Tom embodies becomes overwhelming. Making an audience into angry pensioners it could do, were it not for the incredible sleight of hand. There are those thumping shots of the nightclub, painfully pulsing in a way that reminds one of the hangover before the night is up. Or that one shot of Tom teaching tennis to literally anyone, monotonous arm strain oncoming, that makes one miss the beeping of the tills back home. This supposed ordinary family is purified, cosy nights away from the 'relaxation' of the beating sun and airport trauma. Before the mystery starts proper Islands is a real winner at making it feel like, well, an island.

From there, it loosens its grip. Tom's confusion manifests in the narrative itself, Gerster letting this strange warbling take hold as we revisit locations from the first hour for reasons that seem like a bit of a stretch. Like a float serve, it's too slight a touch to score any effective points, and it's not such a drastic change to surprise, leading to an ending that, while cute, doesn't stay very long. Still, in terms of classical psycho-sexual thrillers, you're not gonna do much better this decade, and there's one specific scene with a camel that breaks through and touches on something genuinely poetic. Or maybe I just love camels and tennis.