In the title story of the 1937 book “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” the Polish Jewish author Bruno Schulz writes of a place where time has come unstuck from the routines and rules of daily life. “Free of this vigilance, it immediately begins to do tricks, run wild, play irresponsible practical jokes, and indulge in crazy clowning,” he writes. In the story’s setting — a remote sanitarium — everyone is asleep or half-dreaming, and the narrator doesn’t know whether his convalescent father is dead or alive.
This is the inspiration for the suitably untethered third feature from Stephen and Timothy Quay, the twin-brother animators who have concocted dream worlds with puppets and scavenged materials for decades. Their film, also titled “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass,” adapts Schulz’s premise of a young man visiting his ailing father but with their special eye for rickety rooms, mirage-like landscapes and liminal states of consciousness. It’s a film of sensations and mystery that feels like it’s wafting toward us from another century, like much of the Quays’ work, channeling uncanny realms of Central European puppetry.
The plot is somewhere between wispy and ambient: Jozef (voiced by Andrzej Klak) wanders within a decrepit sanitarium, baffled by Dr. Gotard and the obscure rituals he witnesses. The Quays freely intermingle wooden-and-clay puppets and live-action moments with Polish actors, adding to the film’s unmoored quality. The action, with minimal dialogue, is better viewed as a chain of visions and rooms, partly linked by a framing device: a lensed gadget that purports to capture the last things seen by its deceased owner, like some perverse early-cinema invention. (The contraption is introduced as being up for auction.) Some of the voyeuristic sights are psychosexual in nature, such as a whip glimpsed through a keyhole.
Schulz’s own work partly floats in time itself, owing to how his reputation grew outside of Poland only decades after he was killed by a Nazi officer in 1942. Despite their politically suggestive prewar source, the Quays’ film feels more invested in a pure fetishism of seeing, with some brief moments even looped in repetition three or four times. There’s nearly a primal wonder to the hazy, soft-focus imagery they create, which feel as if they’re being born before our eyes. The Quays (who adapted Schulz’s “Street of Crocodiles” in 1986) also draw from Schulz’s “The Book of Idolatry,” a collection of risqué glass prints. Likewise, their “Sanatorium” lingers in the mind as a series of haunting images: a train ribboning across a mountain, a hat falling in slow-motion, a six-armed man.
The hushed sound design and the ghostly motifs of the music foster the film’s purgatorial aura. The Quays feel almost maddeningly attached to obscurity here, visually and otherwise, as if they are truly feeling their way though the sensory qualities of sleep and dream fragments. If you close your eyes, you might wake up inside the movie, unstuck from time yourself.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. In theaters.
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