Sanatorium pod klepsydra
Director: Wojciech Has
Writer: Wojciech Has
Based on: some of Bruno Schulz‘ stories
Cast: Jan Nowicki, Tadeusz Kondrat, Irena Orska

Plot:
Joseph (Jan Nowicki) travels to the sanatorium where his father lies dying. The train ride there is already unusual, but the sanatorium itself seems to exist completely outside of time. It’s a crumbling ruin where his father seems to be the only patient, with only a nurse and a doctor present. The more Joseph stays there, the more he loses himself in a series of ever more absurd dreams.

The Hourglass Sanatorium is a weird film that follows dream logic with amazing accuracy and delivers some awesome images. But two hours is too long for that to work.

 

If the film had been about half as long as it was, I think I would have enjoyed it a whole lot (despite the astounding amount of uncalled for boobs that are shown in the film). The set design is wonderful (the sanatorium alone was an awesome place), the transitions between dream fragments is excellently done and I liked the sheer, unexplained absurdity of it.

But two hours of getting bombarded with image after image like that becomes extremely exhausting and about halfway through I was absolutely done with the film already – my brain was just overloaded (and as it usually does when that happens, it turned itself off by falling asleep for a bit).

Jan Nowicki was also interesting as the lead. He has an expressive face and he had no problem switching between looking and acting like an adult and then again as a child.

Even though it got too much, there were many moments that I will remember for quite a while and I did like this way of telling the story of a father and a son. There was just a certain magical atmosphere to it.

Summarizing: if you like surrealist cinema, definitely.