“Sand Castle” is composed of deliberately simple elements: a deserted island, an old creaking lighthouse, and a radio that works intermittently. At its center is a family of four: a doting mother, a resourceful father, a moody teenage son, and a dreaming daughter. Their survival depends on the increasingly futile task of waiting, searching for hope and praying. They hope help will come their way soon. But what initially seems like a modern-day “Robinson Crusoe” adventure soon turns into something much darker and timely. While Matty Brown’s dreamy film reads more like a children’s tale than a lurid thriller at times, its oblique stab at storytelling ends up muddying its ambitious vision and well-intentioned message.
Survival stories hinge on the courage and resilience of their characters. Food is scarce and fresh water is out of reach. Sleeping is nearly impossible and the shelter is close to untenable. Those who make it are those who can overcome those circumstances with self-confidence. But in “The Sand Castle,” Brown (working from a script he co-wrote with Hend Fakhro and Yasmina Karaja) neither stays close to the adults who bring what little food they can to the table, nor the teenager who sneers at the desperate predicament in which they all find themselves. . No, the focus remains mostly on Jana (Riman Rafi), a young girl who spends her days wandering the beaches and has now resigned herself to living in her homeland. Build sand castles and make friends with the ants you encounter in the grass. She knows her parents are waiting for something. Or someone. To get help, that’s obvious, but also to get a way to escape the dangers they face on this beautiful, barren beach where they’re stranded.
Jana’s point of view guides the film, which explains why the details of the family’s history are sketched out so hazily. Early newscast whispers of refugees on capsized boats are the only hint of the full situation of Jana and her family. Instead, “The Sand Castle” feels like a spin-off from “Life of Pi,” where the child protagonist’s apparent fantastical imagination may be hiding a more serious truth best avoided. The visions of bodies we keep encountering—not to mention a little girl’s shoes she finds in the wilderness—may illustrate a more tragic story than the quiet one Jana is trying to conjure.
Jana’s flights of fancy drive the film’s aesthetics, with director Jeremy Snell holding the camera at uncomfortably close levels—so much so that ants, flies, blades of grass, and grains of sand often take up the bulk of the screen. This is a reality not only filtered through the eyes of a young girl, but seen through the peephole that is her imagination. Jana knows her family is running out of time. Her father, Nabil (Ziyad Bakri), constantly needs to repair the lighthouse they hope will guide them on their way. Her mother, Yasmine (Nadine Labaki), is worried about the lack of food they have to eat, and fiddles with the radio, which she knows may be their only chance to call for help. Through it all, her brother Adam (played by Zain Al Rafei) was filled with anxiety and despair, and it was only when tragedy after tragedy struck their family that he finally took on the responsibility of caring for Jana.
This last part of the casting, of course, is what ignites the very conversations that “Sand Castle” wants to engage in: Al-Rafei was a Syrian refugee living in Beirut when he was chosen for the lead role in Labaki’s “Capernaum” (2018). ). Al-Rafii playing the role of son to his former director and brother to his real-life sister is certainly an interesting detail that may provide smart viewers with the appropriate lens through which to find out what is really happening to Jana and her family.
Not much happens in Sand Castle. Instead, there are various incidents (a fishing expedition gone wrong, a UFO appearing under the sand, or a storm destroying the lighthouse). But they’re all captured with such a fractured sense of narrative (it’s always clear that we don’t always get the full picture of what’s going on), that they feel more like fleeting nightmare visions than concrete events. This is all by design, of course. Brown hopes we stay within Jana’s perspective. But what this does is obscure, perhaps too clearly, the horrific reality of what is happening. This results in a review like this, which needs to skim over specific plot points to avoid spoiling what the film itself wants to treat as a strong third act reveal. Such frustrations are felt while watching the film, and are only slightly covered up by the final dedication title card that states the film’s well-intentioned mission quite frankly.
The Sand Castle contains enough hints to indicate that this island and this lighthouse are not what they seem. But it takes so long before Brown finally pulls back the curtain (or the rug from under us, depending on how you experience his narrative style) that his urgent message about the current refugee crisis—and how children are unintended collateral damage—is crucial. Disoriented on the ground. Perhaps a bit dreamy, and featuring some stunning images throughout, this poetic ode to the resilience of children’s imaginative play in the face of trauma is more interesting as a concept than as a film; Urgent as a political appeal, but ultimately too insular in its storytelling to be as resolute as it could be.