The Labanese/UAE-produced picture “The Sand Castle” begins with a shot of Riman Al Rafeea, as the young girl Jana, framed behind a large cloth of blue that could be a sheet, or a sail. In an abrupt cut, she’s framed by broad daylight. In voiceover, she says, “This is my land. Our paradise. Hidden from everyone. It doesn’t know we’re here.”
While we, the viewers, know Jana and her father and mother and snotty slightly older brother are there, we don’t know why they’re there. This strikingly eye-filling movie, directed by Matty Brown and shot by Jeremy Snell, is deliberately low on exposition. There’s a lighthouse on the island; does the family gather in it after spending much of their time outdoors a little after the halfway point of the movie or some time before? After the movie ends, the viewer is, I think, meant to question the way the narrative unwinds. The linear progress of time is made a little indistinct here by a deliberate lack of emphasis on narrative momentum.
There’s a radio with them, an old-school dial model; Brown and Snell sometimes put the tip of its antenna in sharp focus. The radio says, early on, “break for heat wave.” Or so the subtitles (the movie’s spoken language is Arabic) tell us. Later, the boy of the family, Adam, is shown using old-school Walkman earphones.
These characters are stranded outside of historical time, it seems, which is one of the ways that “The Sand Castle” indicates that it’s ultimately, yes, an allegory. Parents Yasmine (Lebanon-born Nadine Labaki, who made an impression in 2018’s acclaimed “Capernaum”) and Nabil (Ziad Bakri, who’s from Palestine) are stern and survival-driven. Jana is more imaginative; it is she who builds the title sand castle, close to the shore. She places it in the middle of a circle, and it’s not a structure that suggest conventional intimidating regality; it looks more humane than your average castle. It represents both Jana’s personality and her values.
The discovery of something threatening under the sand, the lighting effects in a scene in a cave, a dream or fantasy sequence in which Jana has to crawl over a field of corpses, lit with the same blue of the movie’s opening shot; all these give the allegory more disquieting heft. Ultimately the viewer sees the “real” characters behind the metaphors. It’s both terrifying and moving to realize that these people are forced to live in their own imaginations in order to survive.