Islands 2025 Ending Explained & Movie Recap: What Happens To Tom?

Islands are an isolated geography. In the vastness of an ocean blue, they are a patch of land—almost ungoverned by the shore standards of living. Islands have their own living, breathing microcosm with exceptional flora, fauna, and fungi and their melting pot of cultures. Like small towns that have one post office, one hospital, and one club, islands are often distinct in their self-expression; their resources being limited, life becomes closely observable, almost like a celluloid drama. In most vacation islands, the population consists of two factions: the indigenous residents, who are smaller in number, and the vacation industry with its beach resorts teeming with staff and clientele. While this brief paradise may seem like an escape, there is a silent hierarchy in vacation lands. Especially in hotels, and it is an emerging theme in media in shows like White Lotus and films like The Triangle of Sadness. Jan Ole Gerster’s 2025 film Islands is a silent commentary on the coming apart of vacationers on a holiday and a peep into their world that starts to spill through.

Spoilers Ahead

Tom is a washed up tennis coach on an island of diverse geographies called Fuerteventura. It is a holiday island with long, winding shorelines and volcanoes. Between drugged nights at Waikiki and a Dionysian lifestyle, Tom is supposed to work as a tennis coach for the vacationers; Tom, as well as the vacationers, tries to show up occasionally to this commitment every morning. Anne and Dave are a young couple who arrive on the island with their seven-year-old son, Anton. Anne brings Anton for practice and insists that Tom give him individual lessons, as Dave is quite passionate about tennis. Tom, a lone ranger till this point, feels friendly with this couple. He does them a small favor by changing the room to a better one, and they are soon to become friends.The couple looks picture-perfect in the beginning, but Tom senses (and so do I) some tension from Anne towards him and also against Dave. Tom gives the family a local tour of the island, taking them to his camel-owner friends Rafik and his wife; they share dinner and stories, and it really looks like the couple is stepping out of their privileged vacationers’ shoes to experience something more “authentic.”

One night at the hotel, Dave and Anne get into a conflict in front of Tom; Dave reveals that they are on the island to try for their second child. The two got together only after Anne conceived Anton, before which they describe having a wild life—jet-setting from one island to the other. Dave implies that Anton may not be his son. This upsets Anne, and she leaves the soiree briefly in the middle; after this, Dave convinces Tom to go to the club Waikiki for a single drink. At the club, Dave buys a bottle of alcohol and starts getting wasted with the local girls. Unable to spot him anymore, Tom leaves. 

The next morning, Dave seems to be missing. Local police do not take it seriously at first, but soon they have reasons to believe that Anne had something to do with Dave’s disappearance. Anne is laid-back at first, looking for her husband, but she also seems resigned and disillusioned by the entire ordeal. She even thinks that Dave is dead. Upon investigation, the police find out that Dave had made a call to Anne on the night of his disappearance, in which they had an argument and Anne deleted the call from the log. Anne stepped out to look for Dave at 2:30 AM in the morning. These are details that she withheld. While Anne starts looking like a potential suspect, Tom steps in to support Anne and Anton. In Dave’s absence, the chemistry looks even more intense and leads to a kiss. While Tom has one foot in, making false alibis for Anne, Dave is found. What happened to Dave, and what will happen to Tom are the questions the film eventually answers. And in this article, I will try answering the whys behind it.

Dave and Anne are a pair of British tourists, a young, rich couple, and members of a happy family unit—these are their primary identities. However, often, a spatial-temporal change morphs identities, or do I say, peels off the superficial layers of identity to bring in the real one hiding beneath? The unwinding of a vacation really does unwind the tape to its base notes. Dave and Anne were trying for a child—this is their effect, but the cause lay dormant: the cause of this trying and the thin line of suspicion is that Anton may not be Dave’s child. Here goes one disruption in the happy family unit. Dave recently found out he is infertile, and Anne must have slept with someone else before they got married. In short, the familial unit is based on a foundation of lies. This lie peels off the layer of pretense from the unit, and Dave rewinds back to his former self—one that does not wear the coat of being a father. He gets wasted in the club, badmouths his wife, and understandably (okay, hear me out; understandable considering his wasted state and vulnerabilities), wants to jump into the crater of a volcano. While there is an almost witch-hunt-like pointing of fingers at Anne, she does seem pretty relaxed about her husband’s disappearance. This may be because of years of experience in dealing with Dave—after all, their son is seven. So at least eight years of enduring Dave has made her pretty seasoned. She is unbothered, or at least on the surface, to the possibility that Dave might be dead. 

However, Dave is found by the police pretty soon. It clears Anne’s name, and the couple reconcile. There is bitterness for sure, but Dave’s unwinding is done. A vacation geography is liberating; it purged Dave of his inhibitions, anger, and frustration. And soon, he puts on the coats of identities he left behind. He assumes the role of the father and the patriarch. He offers Tom an envelope of money for the little bit of trouble that they had caused—immediately commodifying his emotional labor in exchange for money. The silent hierarchy of subscribers and service providers plays out—there is no making friends in this business. Each party goes back to assuming their position. The family, which came to the island as a family, leaves as one—only to disintegrate, find space, and congeal into an imperfect unit once again. 

Tom is the disruptive force in this familial unit. One that made each of Anne and Dave deflect on him, set apart from each other, and then eventually find their way back. In a way, it looks like Tom provided them an extreme form of couples’ therapy. Dave finds Tom to bond with and takes him to Waikiki to live his unlived days. Anne is constantly emanating a tension towards Tom,  culminating  in a brief spell of intimacy. While Tom looks dejected, giving up on life and taking a hideout on this island, the possibility of Anne sort of startles his stasis. He becomes almost half heartedly convinced that Dave may not come back, and he replaces Dave. Perhaps, this opens his eyes that he may not have been so happy on this island, choosing a comfortable but solitary life.

While Tom seems to have developed genuine attraction towards Anne and an affectionate attachment towards Anton, his place is always outside of this familial construct. He catalyzes a few events, a few realizations, sure. But he is not an insider. As soon as Dave comes back, the structure soon settles as if there were no cracks. Like a series of drunken nights, the incidents are forgotten. This is a commentary on marriage as well; marriages look imperfect, lopsided, ugly, and penetrable from the outside, but in most cases, they last beyond explanations. This happens with Anne and Dave too, while Tom feels a little disoriented.However, the narrative of the film is not unfair to Tom. This episode with Anne and Dave seems to have shaken up his sage-like composure. Perhaps, he does have things to look forward to on the mainland after all. Anne actually asks him what he is doing there since he does not look like a person who would live his life away on an island. Perhaps it is the question that is his disruptive factor, or possibly it is desire. It is almost always desire that drives a human being towards their next step. Even with Anne gone, Tom realizes that the desire towards life is very tangible. The envelope of money is reductive to his efforts and to his desires. Anything he does will only be commodified in this silent hierarchy of islandic paradise. Another strong visual that reinforces that the island has only become a spot for commodification and not a living patch for its residents is when the dead camel of Rafik’s is lifted from the ocean by a crane. No one even looked for it; they only looked for Dave. Tom, who did not want to keep being a part of this economy of emotions, buys a flight ticket and leaves the island. While for Dave and Anne, the vacation becomes a means of excavating their marriage, for Tom it becomes like a rite of passage—one through which he could escape from an escape.