SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS*****

Think of the most sinister but beautiful surreal dream-like worlds created by early Lynch and now imagine that they are depicted mostly with intricately beautifully designed stop-motion puppets.  Imagine film-makers with the creativity and perfection and unspoken synchronicity of the Quay Brothers, working with the haunting, elegiac short stories of Bruno Schulz.  Imagine a world of pre-WW2 Central Europe, literature grappling with the new concepts of subconscious and science, but also treating with enduring emotional topics such as grief and the desire to somehow control time.

This is the world of SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS - a mesmerising, haunting and truly beautiful piece of art created by the Quay Brothers. I watched it in IMAX - a bizarre format for such an intricate miniature world, and yet wonderful because it really allowed us to see the detail of it.

The film opens with a live action framing device - an auctioneer atop a roof advertising his surreal and unique wares. And then we see him with a particularly wonderful box of tricks - a retina that liquifies under moonlight and little apertures that allow us to see the dying thoughts of our protagonist.

And so we enter the stop-motion world and our protagonist Jozef, lightly modelled on Bruno Schulz himself. He is travelling on a near-abandoned and anachronistic trainline to a strange sanatorium where his father is both alive and dead.  Dr Gotard explains that time is strange here. And we will see events played and replayed amidst the dusty gothic corridors that could have come from Nosferatu or Gormenghast.  The film resists easy explanations and conventional narratives. It evokes mood and emotion with few hooks for the casual viewer to hang his hat on. But those who know the works and life of Schulz will see his iconography in the film, and most poignantly Jozef clutching a loaf of bread, foreshadowing Schulz' execution by the Gestapo.

SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS has a running time of 75 minutes. It played Venice and London 2024 and Kinoteka 2025.