In Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, young Jozef boards a train to a remote sanatorium in the Carpathians to see his dying father one last time. But what awaits him there is anything but comforting: a dilapidated building full of whispering ghosts and enigmatic rooms, where time stretches like chewing gum and reality slowly fades away. As Jozef wanders from room to room, he descends into a sighing underworld, a poetic steampunk landscape full of memories, ghosts, and scars from the past.
The Quay brothers made us wait 20 years for their third feature film, an adaptation that manages to capture the essence of Bruno Schulz’s haunting story. The film has appeared on many critics' end-of-year lists, but has reached only a small audience so far. Let yourself be carried away by the dreamy aesthetic and the extremely atmospheric universe, where a dark, murky, and disjointed logic distorts reality.