Castaway

Castaway (1986) is a British drama from Nicolas Roeg that you can watch online on iFILM. Cold, grey London, a dead-end office job — and then a young woman answers a newspaper ad: a middle-aged man wants a companion to spend a year with him on a remote tropical island.

That's how Lucy (Amanda Donohoe) and Gerald (Oliver Reed) end up alone on a bare scrap of land in the South Seas. The postcard fantasy peels away fast — hunger, heat, bickering, no comforts, and two near-strangers with nowhere to escape each other. Roeg isn't filming a survival adventure so much as the slow collapse of an illusion, and bit by bit it's Lucy, not Gerald, who has the will to see the whole year through.

It's drawn from real events and Lucy Irvine's memoir of the year she actually spent on Tuin Island in the Torres Strait. Sensual and deliberately uncomfortable, cut in Roeg's restless, time-jumping style, it suits anyone after a grown-up drama rather than a beach idyll. Stream Castaway (1986) online on iFILM.