Directed by Jan-Ole Gerster | Written by Gerster, with Blaž Kutin and Lawrie Doran | ▲▲▲ |  VOD

Cinephiles will recognize where they are in the opening minute of Islands. This is a daytime noir consisting of deserts and water, both the stuff you drink and the stuff that fills swimming pools, swaddled in a theme that lifts directly from Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Chinatown. The yellow, rounded font in the titles speaks to American exploitation thrills, but the pacing is Euro, channelling another Nicholson movie from the 1970s, Antonioni’s The Passenger. None of this is a criticism — steal from the best and maybe you’ll come up with something original along the way.

Tom (Sam Riley) is a former tennis pro, nicknamed Ace, offering tennis lessons at a resort in the Canary Islands. He’s appealingly louche behind his RayBans, rumpled linen, and five o’clock shadow, enjoying the nightlife and the casual intimacies of visitors. He also hangs with an older couple (Ahmed Boulane and Fatima Adoum) who offer camel rides to tourists, along with a local cop (Pep Ambròs).

Into this idyll come a pair of tourists, Anne and Dave (Stacey Martin and Jack Farthing), and their seven-year-old, Anton (Dylan Torrell). Tom seems fascinated by Anne, and before long Tom is playing tour guide for the family. Anne and Dave’s marital problems bubble to the surface from time to time, but without much consequence. This isn’t a plot-driven picture, not until almost an hour in when Dave disappears after a night at the club, leaving Tom and Anne to search for him and involve the authorities.

Here’s where the picture shakes off much of its aspirations of art and instead gnaws into the pulp, more of a Hitchcock or Highsmith kind of a story, a missing-person mystery with an underlying and surprising wit. Martin is especially funny in what her character withholds and what she pointedly doesn’t. Throughout Tom remains opaque in his motivations, how much he knows about the night Dave vanished, and why he’s so intrigued by Anne. Then there’s some business with a camel who steals every scene he appears in.

Islands is slow-going in places, but Gerster exerts a solid grip on the tone of his movie and provides a terrific sense of place. If in the end it turns out the picture is a character study rather than a genre piece, offering a lesson about lifestyle, it’s still never less than soulful in the journey it takes us on.