The Sand (2015)

It’s January. We’ve been pinned down for a few days by an historic winter storm, so naturally my thoughts turn to the beach. My favorite beach horror is probably The Horror of Party Beach, an eco-horror film about a hot dog fish-monster, but if your tastes run to films made this century, The Sand will certainly do. It’s a movie that knows exactly one good idea — the floor is lava — and discovers too late that it isn’t quite enough to fill ninety minutes.

We join in medio convivio — a graduation party on the beach. There’s lots of dancing, drinking, snogging. There’s also plenty of confiscation of cell phones. “Vegas rules!” a guy with a kitchen trash-bag shouts. Why? To make sure embarrassing photos don’t show up on the Net. And because all it would really take to resolve this problem is a quick call.

By morning, we have a much smaller group — a few people who fell asleep in a car, a couple in a lifeguard stand, someone sacked out on a picnic table, and a fat guy shoved in a steel drum. One bird and two graduates later, we’ve established the rules: “the floor is lava.” Touch the sand and you’re dead.

Let’s talk about what we’ve got to work with. It’s a handful of attractive actors, a single setting, and not much in the way of creature effects. Much of the tension comes from problem-solving, just like the original game. How do you get from here to there without touching the sand?

Coming up with motivations to move is somewhat more difficult. In my mind, the priority would be to head for the rocks. But Jonah decides to build a surfboard walkway deeper into the beach to check the contents of a sack on a picnic table.

Much of The Sand doesn’t survive scrutiny, so you should just turn that part of your brain off. “Why don’t they just…” questions become too numerous; it’s easier to assume all the honor society students passed out on the sand.

The concept is silly, but the actors sell it. There’s not the kind of wink-and-nod, “hey, we’re in a bad movie” cop-out so much postmillennial low-budget horror engages in. On the other hand, I’ve seen a lot of other reviewers refer to the film as “campy.” It didn’t seem campy to me at all, which probably means I’m not correctly calibrated for 2010 camp.

The biggest problem is filling the runtime. Since they don’t worry about exposure issues—these kids are getting an awful lot of sun, have no water, and are really low on snacks—the problems boil down to “how do we get our phones” and “how do we stay off the sand.” The first would have been a lot easier if Jonah had made phones, not a sack on a picnic table, his priority.

And the second is just: don’t touch the sand. There’s some suggestion that what our survivors are clinging to will also be dragged under at some point, but it’s an idle threat.

As a result we have a lot of yelling back and forth that starts to wear thin. And a romantic subplot that I cared so little about I had to wonder why these kids took it so seriously. For example, Kaylee risks her life to join Chandra in the car, and when she makes it in she socks Chandra in the jaw because Chandra’s been making moves on Kaylee’s boyfriend Jonah. Why care so much, now, under these circumstances? Minutes later, Chandra and Kaylee have put the whole thing behind themselves.

Old beach movies filled the time with pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo and two or three rock numbers thrown in the middle, which really does help pad things out. But such stuff is really passé in the 2010s, so shouting at each other is all we get.

Although it veers a bit into the tedious and you tend to want to shout “make better choices” at the director and not the characters, The Sand is a perfectly pleasant movie if you don’t want to have your brain engaged and you’re just trying to ignore the ice raining down outside. You could do a lot better, but you could also do a lot worse.

Published Wed Jan 28 2026 06:21:25 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time)