Berlinale 2025: Jan-Ole Gerster’s ‘Islands’ Film Set on Fuerteventura
by Alex Billington
February 19, 2025
Time to take another trip out to an island to escape from the world as we know it. One of my favorite films of the 2025 Berlin Film Festival is this fantastic indie creation called Islands, the latest feature film made by German filmmaker Jan-Ole Gerster. I’m already a big fan of Gerster – his first two feature films A Coffee in Berlin (aka Oh Boy – from 2012) and Lara (from 2019) are two of my favorites as well (and I recommend catching up with both since most people haven’t seen them). He’s a remarkably talented, crafty filmmaker who comes around every few years with an absolute banger new film that somehow remains under the radar despite getting rave reviews. I hope this one finds a much larger audience outside of Germany, and I expect it will. Islands is his first film entirely in English, set on the popular tourist island of Fuerteventura in the Grand Canary Islands archipelago. I loved it. This is one of 2025 cinema’s gems – I will be talking about this film all year long and I’m ready to rewatch it already. I also really need the score to listen to while working.
Islands is directed by Jan-Ole Gerster and it was shot on location entirely on the island of Fuerteventura. The screenplay is written by Lawrie Doran, Jan-Ole Gerster, and Blaz Kutin. It seems like a personal story, but it’s a bit hard to tell. Nonetheless a story about how we’re all stuck on our own “islands.” British actor Sam Riley stars as Tom, a tennis pro washed up on a holiday island. He spends his days teaching tennis to tourists who stay at his hotel resort on the island, then gets drunk almost every night, sleeping with random women and/or waking up hung over on the beach with no idea how he got there. He’s a smart guy, but like many folks, he seems stuck in his repetitive, lonely, simple life – despite the fact that he’s living in paradise on a gorgeous island. When he crosses paths with a particular tourist family, it seems to wake him up from his slumber… Maybe. Stacy Martin co-stars as Anne, a beautiful woman who shows up at this resort with her son and asks Tom to give him tennis lessons. Her jackass husband Dave, played by Jack Farthing, also appears and causes a frustrating ruckus when he ends up getting extremely drunk and disappears one night.
There’s much more going on in Islands than it seems at first glance. It’s clever, captivating island noir meets lonely tennis dude fun with some Fuerteventura spice and a few island-living twists thrown in. Sam Riley’s bumbling Tom character is similar to Tom Schilling’s bumbling Niko character in Gerster’s film A Coffee in Berlin, which is not a surprise to see, but makes watching him particularly entertaining. He’s actually kinda likable – though I’m sure some people will say he’s an asshole, or a deadbeat, or whatever. I don’t agree, he just needs to get his ass back in gear, and maybe meeting this family will be the jolt he really needs. He is generally pretty nice, he tries to help people, he’s just a lazy alcoholic who doesn’t care much about anything anymore. As for Anne, this is one of my favorite Stacy Martin performance since her original appearance in Nymphomaniac. She’s so lovely and intriguing in this, soft on the outside, but firm in her intelligence and composure. All of her moments with Tom really warmed my soul, for reasons I won’t reveal until more have seen it. I really wanted her to stick around & keep this ship on course, but alas that’s not how the story goes.
The jazzy score, the naturalistic performances, the intrigue, the mystery, the allure of the island(s) – all of it is top notch filmmaking. Gerster completely pulls off an exceptionally challenging mix between a noir story involving the missing man, which shakes up the story midway through, and a lighthearted vacation island comedy involving a washed up middle-aged dude who really needs to pull himself out of his existential rut. I enjoyed both sides of this film, and could’ve spent hours and hours hanging out with Tom and his friends and everyone else on the island. The unique score by composer Dascha Dauenhauer feels like a perfect fit, even if it leans into the more mysterious, thrilling side of the plot. I have only positive things to say and compliments to give, without much real critical feedback that isn’t nitpicking. While there’s plenty to discuss and debate about what the point of the film is, or what it is trying to say about guys like Tom and dreamy places like the Canary Islands, the most potent part of the film is its subtle wink at the challenges of making real romance work. The right relationships between the right people are rare – and we shouldn’t let them go.
Alex’s Berlinale 2025 Rating: 9 out of 10
Follow Alex on Twitter – @firstshowing / Or Letterboxd – @firstshowing
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