Netflix film “The Sand Castle”, which was released in last month, is an allegorical drama gradually revealing the underlying reality surrounding its main characters. The overall result feels a little too broad and symbolic, and it seems to lose its direction before eventually reaching to its last act, but it works to some degree thanks to its competent direction and the sincere efforts from its main cast members.

The main background of the movie is a little flat island located in the middle of some sea area, and we soon meet its four current residents: Nabil (Ziad Bakri), his wife Yasmine (Nadine Labaki), and their two children Jana (Riman Al Rafeea) and Adam (Riman Al Rafeea). For some unknown reason, they have been stuck there for quite a long time, and Nabil and Yasmine have been trying their best for taking care of their children while also searching for any possible chance for leaving the island.

Although the situation has not been exactly hopeful, things are not totally bad for them at least for now. While they have to be careful about consuming the remaining food for them, they stay in an abandoned lighthouse which they make into a little shelter of their own. Via the searchlight and the radio equipment of the lighthouse, Nabil attempts to make a contact with anyone near the island day by day, but, so far, nobody has responded to his desperate calling.

While their parents keep trying to maintain the status quo for the family, Adam and Jana spend their daytime here and there in the island. Because Adam prefers to be alone as your average sullen adolescent kid, Jana usually plays alone by herself, and we observe how often she seems to be immersed in her own little fantasy.

However, it looks like whatever she sees and experiences is not just a pigment of imagination at all. When Jana is playing with her sandcastle at the beach of the island at one point, she finds something odd beneath the sand layer of the beach, and what she innocently commits next seems to cause a big trouble for her parents.

The mood becomes more unnerving as more strange things happen around Jana and her family. When he and his son try to get some seafood to eat, Nabil experiences something quite disturbing and then gets seriously injured. As his physical condition becomes more and more deteriorated, Yasmine and her two children become more desperate than ever, but they are still stuck in their isolated status with no one to come and then help them, and they also come to sense more of the ominous vibe surrounding them.

Around that narrative point, the movie baffles us more as the respective viewpoints of its four main characters become a lot more unreliable. As they struggle in one way or another, we get some fragments of memories and hallucinations along the story, and we naturally wonder more about what is exactly happening to them.

The screenplay by director Matty Brown, who made a feature debut here after making several short films, and her co-writers Hend Fakhroo and Yassmina Karajah never clarifies whatever is really happening in the story until the last act, which is incidentally followed by a bit of explanation on the real main subject of the story. This can be quite frustrating at times, but Brown and her crew members including cinematographer Jeremy Snell did a fairly good job of establishing the increasingly surreal atmosphere from the beginning, and I was a bit surprised to learn later that they actually shot the film in a real flat island near Lebanon.

In addition, the movie is supported well by the engaging performance from its four main cast members, who are effortless in their interactions throughout the story and provide some heart and soul to the movie. While Ziad Bakri and Nadine Labaki, who has been mainly known for her powerful Oscar-nominated film “Capernaum” (2018), hold the ground as required, Riman and Zain Al Rafeea, who are real-life siblings and also appeared together in “Capernaum”, are often harrowing as the movie reveals a bit more about their characters’ reality, and the latter is particularly good when her character inevitably confronts her suppressed memory later in the story.

In conclusion, “The Sand Castle” is interesting for being somewhere between M. Night Shyamalan and David Lynch, but it does not work as well as intended due to its rather thin narrative which only gets muddled with more confusion before arriving at the last act. During that part, we finally understand what the movie is really about, but we remain baffled and dissatisfied about how it is about, and I think the movie could be more coherent with more details in terms of story and characters.

Nevertheless, I must say that it is nice to watch something different from those soulless stuffs we usually get from Netflix month by month, and I think Brown is a promising filmmaker who may move onto better works later. Considering the good efforts shown from the movie, she has considerable potential in my humble opinion, and I sincerely hope that I will be more satisfied in the next time.