Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

As perplexing as it is hypnotic, The Quay Brothers’s disorienting new stop-motion fever dream is the kind of film that actively encourages engagement while on the razor’s edge of waking and sleep. Adapting the Polish artist Bruno Schulz’s fragmented novel of the same name, the film actively discourages being taken on terms linear or literal.

Over the course of a brisk but dense 76 minutes, we are promptly shuffled from live-action black and white to spare, resolutely un-pretty stop-motion animation. Broadly speaking, these wonderings involve a mysterious train ride and a decaying sanatorium, and our narrator – insofar as we have one – in one of these threads may have fathered our narrator in another.

The little dialogue that is spoken in Sanatorium Under the Hourglass is in Polish, though what is said is of such little note that it almost comes as a surprise that we are granted subtitles. Our surrender is no doubt the point, as the Quays take us less in a direct line towards a discernible destination, and more on a slow amble through differing, cobwebbed chambers. Putting aside narrative clarity, whether any of it manages to resonate on an emotional level will likely be within the eye of the beholder.  As it stands, the viewer is sent out perplexed, but with individual sights and sounds growing in resonance with the passage of time.

This challenging curio will likely find its most appreciative audience with the same crowd that savoured Phil Tippett’s Mad God, similarly alluring in the vividly hand-crafted industrial ugliness of its design.

Thomas Messner

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass does not have a release date yet.

Read more reviews from our London Film Festival coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the London Film Festival website here.

Watch the trailer for Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass here: