The Hourglass Sanatorium

The Hourglass Sanatorium feels like an acid trip within a dream. It starts with a straightforward premise: a man visits his father in a mystical sanatorium where time does not behave normally. Within twenty minutes, we enter an incomprehensible dreamscape.

A bit of reading suggests the film is true to Bruno Schulz’s Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the collection of dreamlike, poetic short stories that inspired it. Accurate or not, any semblance of a plot quickly falls apart. If plot matters to you, this film is unwatchable. 

So why finish it?

It’s beautiful and bizarre in equal measure. Wojciech Jerzy Has and the army of people who worked on this film created a sequence of visually stunning scenes that play out on elaborate sets. I stopped reading the subtitles around halfway through the film and focused on the visuals instead. It was worth watching for that alone.