“The Sand Fort” is made up of deliberately easy components: an deserted island, a creaky previous lighthouse, an intermittently working radio. And at its middle is a household of 4: a doting mom, a resourceful father, a moody teen son and a daydreaming daughter. Their survival is determined by the more and more Sisyphean process of ready and scavenging, hoping and praying. Assist, they hope, will quickly come their manner. However what at first seems like a modern-day “Robinson Crusoe” journey quickly turns into one thing darker and altogether extra well timed. Whereas Matty Brown’s dreamy movie performs extra like a youngsters’s fable than the harrowing thriller it typically flirts with turning into, its indirect stab at storytelling finally ends up muddling its bold imaginative and prescient and well-intended message.
Survival tales hinge on the grit and resilience of its characters. Meals is scarce and contemporary water elusive. Sleep is close to unimaginable and shelter near untenable. Those that make it are those that can climate these circumstances with aplomb. However in “The Sand Fort,” Brown (working from a script he co-wrote with Hend Fakhroo and Yassmina Karajah), doesn’t keep near the adults bringing what little meals they will to the desk, nor to {the teenager} who scoffs on the hopeless predicament all of them discover themselves in. No, the main focus stays totally on Jana (Riman Al Rafeea), the younger woman who spends her days wandering the seashores she’s now resigned herself to calling residence, constructing sand castles and making pals with ants she encounters within the grass. She is aware of her dad and mom are ready for one thing. Or somebody. For assist, that a lot is obvious, but additionally for a solution to escape the hazards they encounter in that inhospitable if stunning barren seaside they’re stranded on.
It’s Jana’s standpoint that guides the movie, which explains why the small print of the household’s historical past are sketched so hazily. Early whispers of reports broadcasts about refugees on capsized boats are the one trace of Jana and her household’s full state of affairs. As an alternative, “The Sand Fort” performs virtually like a riff on “Lifetime of Pi,” the place the clearly fanciful creativeness of its baby protagonist might be hiding a extra harmful actuality greatest stored at bay. These visions of our bodies we preserve encountering — to not point out a younger woman’s shoe she finds within the wilderness — could spell out a extra tragic story than the oft-serene one Jana is making an attempt to conjure.
Jana’s flights of fancy drive the movie’s aesthetics, with D.P. Jeremy Snell retaining the digital camera at uncomfortably shut ranges — a lot in order that ants, flies, blades of grass and grains of sands usually take up the majority of the display screen. This can be a actuality not simply filtered via the eyes of a younger woman however seen via the peephole that’s her creativeness. Jana is aware of her household is working out of time. Her father Nabil (Ziad Bakri) is consistently needing to repair the lighthouse they hope will information assist their manner. Her mom Yasmine (Nadine Labaki) frets over how little meals all of them should eat and fiddles with the radio she is aware of might be their solely likelihood to sign for assist. And all through all of it, her brother Adam (performed by Zain Al Rafeea) is a ball of angst and despair, solely finally taking over the duty of caring for Jana when tragedy after tragedy befalls their household.
It’s that latter little bit of casting, after all, which tees up the very conversations “The Sand Fort” desires to enter: Al Rafeea was a Syrian refugee dwelling in Beirut when he was solid within the starring function in Labaki’s “Capernaum” (2018). Having Al Rafeea play son to his former director and brother to his real-life sister is a decidedly provocative element that will provide canny viewers the fitting lens via which to suss out what is absolutely occurring to Jana and her household.
Not that a lot occurs in “The Sand Fort.” Relatively, there are numerous incidents (a fishing expedition gone awry, a mysterious object seems beneath the sand, a storm ravages the lighthouse). However they’re all captured with such a fractured sense of narrative (it’s all the time clear we’re not all the time getting the total image of what’s occurring), that they really feel extra like fleeting, nightmarish visions than tangible occasions. That is all by design, after all. Brown needs us to remain inside Jana’s perspective. However what this does is obscure, maybe all too clearly, the harrowing fact of what’s going down. It leads to a overview like this one, that should skate over particular plot factors so as to keep away from spoiling what the movie itself desires to deal with as a strong third act reveal. Such frustrations are felt whereas watching the movie, and are solely barely papered over by the ultimate dedication title card which spells out the movie’s well-meaning mission fairly bluntly.
“The Sand Fort” has sufficient hints all through to recommend that this island and this lighthouse are usually not all they seem like. Nevertheless it takes so lengthy for Brown to lastly pull the curtain (or the rug from beneath us, relying on the way you expertise its narrative type) that its pressing message concerning the present refugee disaster — and the way youngsters are inadvertent collateral injury — is all too muddled to land. Dreamy maybe to a fault, and that includes some putting visuals all through, this poetic ode to the resilience of youngsters’s imaginative play within the face of trauma is extra intriguing as an idea than as a movie; pressing as a political plea, however in the end a lot too insular in its storytelling to land as firmly because it ought to.
