The director, Matty Brown, wisely decided to reveal the secret at the end of The Sand Castle. This proves the point of the message on the card screen before the credits.
If you are curious about what The Sand Castle’s ending means, here is the explanation: The whole film, story, and experiences were allegories. The scenes on the idyllic island beforehand were a visual representation of Jana’s imagination.
Jana was really on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, fleeing from her war-torn country. This is why the ending of the film says:
“Nearly 500 million children worldwide live in areas affected by armed conflict. They live in constant fear, experience grave violations of their rights including forced displacement with serious impacts on mental health.
This film is dedicated to all the children who are forced to live in their own imagination in order to survive.”
The Sand Castle makes a salient and powerful point that many children are victims of war, and often, through trauma and survival, they have to use their expansive imaginations to endure the torment the conflict brings.
Jana used elements of her lifeboat to imagine the island and the lighthouse; for example, the logo on the boat visualizes what the island looks like, and she used that to imagine an entirely different world where her real-life experiences seep in.
The film specifically hints that the story is born from Jana’s imagination. The biggest giveaway is that Jana is the most innocent sibling in the movie. She enjoys what the island offers and is playful, while her brother is anxious, believing they will die. This shows that Jana’s consciousness is helping her avoid the chaos around her.
Jana also fears a monster lurking or an ominous omen becoming her family, which happens. The film highlights the deaths of her family members in vague and mysterious ways. It’s never completely clear and is matched with metaphoric visualization.
What Jana is imagining can be interpreted in many ways. Her imagination allows her to avoid the horrors of fleeing a war-torn country. It’s possible that her imagination was shrouding the deaths of her family members, either them dying on the lifeboat or before they got on it. I suspect both; the family struggles to keep it together as the film progresses, and being stranded at sea likely brings their demise.
It’s a meaningful way to convey a message about refugees, especially children, fleeing war. The Sand Castle does it excellently. The film gets it succinctly across in the most impactful way.
And that’s why the director leaves the reveal right at the end. It was always meant to be about a child’s imagination and not their experiences of their family leaving the war zone. The experiences are there but jigsawed within the visual imagination.
