Burn­ing Sands

Before becom­ing bonafide fra­ter­ni­ty broth­ers, the stu­dents at the cen­tre of Burn­ing Sands must endure a week of tor­ment. They are led on march­es, beat­en, pelt­ed with ten­nis balls and forced to eat dog food. Each young man has his own rea­son for tak­ing part. Some want to improve their career prospects; oth­ers hope to enhance their col­lege reputation.

Moti­vat­ed by his father’s fail­ure to com­plete his own haz­ing, Z (Trevor Jack­son) decides he must prove his worth. The set­up is intrigu­ing enough, but con­trived sub­plots – from Z’s strained rela­tion­ship with his girl­friend, to his implied inter­est in anoth­er woman, to his slump in aca­d­e­m­ic stan­dards – feel shoe­horned in and risk detract­ing from the main narrative.

Yet we root for Z regard­less thanks to Jackson’s strong, emo­tive per­for­mance. When Z is asked why he won’t give up, he screams the fraternity’s four core prin­ci­ples: ​“Broth­er­hood, schol­ar­ship, lead­er­ship, com­pas­sion”. Jack­son fur­rows his brow and puck­ers his lips in exag­ger­at­ed aggres­sion as he bel­lows this line, only to fall into uncer­tain­ty, fea­tures droop­ing, as soon as the act is dropped.

The film is set in a his­tor­i­cal­ly black (and fic­ti­tious) col­lege named after Fred­er­ick Dou­glass, an abo­li­tion­ist whose cam­pus lega­cy is per­va­sive. While a scorn­ful scrib­ble on a his­to­ry assign­ment sug­gests that Z doesn’t read up on his sources, he recites Dou­glass repeat­ed­ly, using his quotes to link haz­ing to the strug­gles and injus­tices of slavery.

Else­where, we wit­ness a brand­ing and the slash of a switch-like met­al rod, and hear casu­al men­tion of a ​“slave beat down”. Though the ref­er­ences are clear, writer/​director Ger­ard McMurray’s inten­tion remains elu­sive. Pow­er con­cedes noth­ing with­out a demand, Dou­glass insist­ed in the speech that Z so often bor­rows from, but the rare instances of rebel­lion here are met with retal­i­a­tion, not compromise.

The cli­mac­tic threat of ​‘Hell Night’, the week’s finale, looms. By the time this event arrives, how­ev­er, any poten­tial ten­sion has been negat­ed by the film’s stop-start pac­ing and over-reliance on dra­mat­ic irony. Viewed as a cau­tion­ary tale about the dan­gers of haz­ing, Burn­ing Sands duti­ful­ly does its job. As hard-hit­ting sociopo­lit­i­cal com­men­tary, it falls short.