‘Islands’ feels like a blend of Hitchcock, Patricia Highsmith, and ‘Columbo’: part thriller, part character study, with an enigmatic, washed-out protagonist at its centre. Tom (Sam Riley) is a tennis pro at a Canary Islands resort, a man drifting through life as if on permanent vacation. He has no partner, no children, and fills the void with sex, drugs, and alcohol. Reliable enough to turn up for work each morning, he is nonetheless a man on the edge—talented but hollow, living in a state of suspended animation.

Into his orbit comes a family, seemingly innocuous at first: a mother asking for lessons for her seven-year-old son. Anne Murphy (Stacy Martin) carries the aura of a Hitchcock blonde—cool, alluring, with a hint of menace. Tom is instantly captivated. The film toys with noir tropes: the loser sleepwalking through life who may or may not wake up; the woman whose presence destabilises everything; the suggestion of hidden histories. There are hints Tom may once have had a fling with Anne, perhaps even fathering her child, though the truth remains deliberately ambiguous.

As Tom becomes entangled with Anne and her fractured family, his carefully contained routine begins to crumble. He cancels lessons, shirks responsibilities, and spirals into recklessness. The film plants surreal touches, such as the detail that Tom once beat Rafael Nadal, earning him the nickname ‘Ace’, that blur the line between myth and reality, adding to its sense of dislocation.

Stylistically, it plays like a piece of European arthouse Hitchcock, full of cliff-top encounters and withheld explanations. The mystery of why Anne has come to the island is never fully revealed, and the gaps in the story become part of its allure. What emerges is less a straightforward thriller than a meditation on emptiness, temptation, and the way one encounter can unravel an entire life.

The noir mood intensifies when a detective in the ‘Columbo’ mould begins to pick apart Anne’s testimony, exposing cracks and contradictions. The film builds not to neat resolution but to unease, leaving us uncertain of who is guilty and who is lost.

‘Islands’ is a beautiful slice of modern noir: enigmatic, psycho-sexual, and elusive. It thrives on mystery, ambiguity, and atmosphere, offering a haunting portrait of a man undone not by crime alone, but by the hollowness at the heart of his own existence.