Time, space and mortality do not work according to any earthly scheme in the half-lit, hand-crafted twilight world of ‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ – so it is fitting that this dizzying stop-motion vision seems to work according to the temporal laws of its time. own. The first feature film in almost two decades from cult animators the Quay Brothers runs just 76 minutes, but while watching it feels both infinitely longer and over in the blink of an eye, like a dream of epic proportions that you forget seconds after waking. This dark, densely packed fairy tale about life, death and what comes in between is inspired by the writings of Polish literary titan Bruno Schulz, but with a collapsing, free-form model of storytelling all its own – less driven by logic than through intuitive feeling and atmosphere. , and that’s where the Quays’ signature ethereal images come into focus.
The opaque elusiveness of “Sanatorium” may frustrate viewers who, once drawn into the vividly troubled Gothic fantasy of the film’s storyworld, find themselves adrift in a shape-shifting tale in which characters are multiplied, chronologies are bent and fused, and even death is multiplied. it ends. Those more familiar with the Quays’ work – especially their influential 1986 short film ‘Street of Crocodiles’, also freely adapted from Schulz – will be better prepared for the baroque eccentricities and inscrutabilities of their latest, out this year premiered on the Venice Days sidebar and is destined for extensive festival play, sparse arthouse distribution, and a cult-like afterlife. Now in their late 70s, with celebrities like Christopher Nolan in their corner, the Pennsylvania-born, London-based twins still have no plans for the mainstream.
Beautiful antique-style title cards announce the setting of Sanatorium Karpaty, a mysterious hospice at the foot of the Carpathians, in 1937 – the same year Schulz published the novel with which the film shares a title, a Kafkaesque spirit and more themes than just the film. plot points. However, we must reach this environment through a complex framework involving a sinister auction house. There, investigative items on the block include the fossilized ribs of a sea siren, the warm blood of bees and, crucially to the film’s interests, a ‘Maquette for the Grave of a Dead Retina’ – a kind of shadow box animated by a shaft of sunlight on the preserved eye of its former owner, whose seven viewing lenses give the film its seven graceful chapter titles. (The stilted language feels like the film’s driest running gag.)
It is in the Maquette that the story unfolds about Jozef (mumblingly voiced by Andrzej KÅ‚ak), a stern young man on a winding train journey through a remote part of Eastern Europe to the Sanatorium, where his elderly father is dying or dead, depending from where you are. As the dark supervising Doctor Gotard explains, the facility is in a time warp out of sync with the rest of the universe, somewhere between reality and a dream state: Joseph may find his father alive in some dimension, but only through tortured feelings. exploration of the labyrinthine corridors of the enormous building. Even this description makes ‘Sanatorium’ sound more linear than it is, as Joseph’s journey increasingly disintegrates into a psychological maelstrom in which memories, nightmares and waking reality become indistinguishable, while the film’s structure and imagery starting to look like itself.
Even if the film becomes more difficult to parse on a narrative level, it continues to provoke a chilling emotional response. Intense sadness, fear and longing are all palpable as Joseph spins into the void, felt through the claustrophobic beauty of the animation – all exquisitely spindly, fragile puppet forms in ancient shades of tin and cloth, each frame resembling a long-forgotten steampunk diorama . as reflected in a weathered mirror – and the fragile, haunting lullabies of Timothy Nelson’s score (credited with ‘music and soundscapes’). Dim lighting and a gauzy, cobweb-like aesthetic mean we have to concentrate as hard on what we’re looking at as on the intricately tangled plots, though that helps the film’s eerie quality, as if it were itself a curio pulled from an unknown time and place.
The animation, meanwhile, is fused with live-action scenes that feel no less surreal, shot in a blurry, distorted way to evoke fragments of silent cinema or vintage erotica. Where these passages fit into the film’s mysterious narrative design is open to interpretation: perhaps the human faces here are the stuff of the disturbing, untethered imagination of the puppet folk of “Sanatorium,” who look somehow bruised and injured and physical appearance despite their wooden construction. clay and guinea fowl feathers. Seductive and confusing in equal measure, the last of the Quays is such a journey that our world looks a little stranger when the lights come on and we emerge, blinking dimly, back into it.
