‘The Sand Castle’ (2025) Netflix Movie Review - Matty Brown’s Ostentatious Tricks

A family of four - Jana (Riman Al Rafeea), Nabil (Ziad Bakri), Yasmine (Nadine Labaki), and Adam (Zain Al Rafeea) - gets stuck on an island. A voice on the radio informs us that a meeting between the Greek Prime Minister and the Turkish President has been confirmed. The voice further adds that "the Prime Minister has confirmed that dozens of migrants drowned when a boat capsized off the coast, with potentially hundreds still missing." Is this family one of the victims? Did they survive that boat accident and somehow arrive on this island? Nabil and Yasmine often fix the radio to establish a communication link with the rescue team. Jana draws pictures on the wall or her notebook, while Adam spends most of his time looking grouchy. The island they are stuck on is small and surrounded by sea. There is a lighthouse in the middle, where the family rests, cooks, and sleeps. Before sunset, Nabil takes one of his kids to the top floor of the lighthouse to switch on the light. Maybe a boat or a rescue ship will notice the light and come to the island to rescue the family. As the days go by, everybody becomes less and less optimistic. Will they ever be saved from their plight?

Matty Brown's The Sand Castle is more than just a survival movie. There are more layers to it. At first, however, it attempts to keep you guessing. Jana discovers a yellow board beneath the sand and hears faint screams. Nabil sees something inside the water and gets injured severely. While drawing something on the wall, Jana hears a scratching sound nearby. A character finds a red shoe; the island starts sucking in the sand after a while. What's happening? Take the scene where the characters eat breakfast together. Jana narrates an incident where Adam wets his pants after seeing a crab. Adam denies the story, and you, too, initially consider it Jana's way of teasing her sibling. But when the events take a turn towards the realm of fantasy, you wonder if everything is just unfolding inside Jana's mind. Is she imagining all these things? And that information regarding the meeting between the Greek Prime Minister and the Turkish President introduces a political angle into the story. At the back of your mind, you figure out the twist, but it remains a bit hazy due to the dreamy visuals on the screen.

These "dreamy visuals" undermine the film's message - its cry for peace (the heart-shaped island, by the end, is completely destroyed). Brown, with cinematographer Jeremy Snell, creates images that are superficially attractive. When Yasmine goes down a basement, we watch a game of light and shadow on her body. Jana's face is framed behind a glass jar, and her eyes are made to look big. Brown provides us with glimpses of life beyond the confines of the island by combining them with other images that appear and disappear very quickly. This style doesn't suggest that we are viewing something through a child's imaginative perspective. Rather, they give us the impression of being in the company of a filmmaker who is too obsessive about the beauty of his images. The Sand Castle is nothing but Brown's résumé/reel - he shows that he is capable of making a film. To give this ostentatious exercise a veneer of profundity, Brown inserts a weighty text at the end, which doesn't land effectively because the movie is mostly busy impressing us with its editing tricks. Brown takes a serious issue and renders it cheap. I wish The Sand Castle had just been a plain film about the survival of a family.

Final Score- [3/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times