In pre-Second World War Poland, a young man, Józef (Jan Nowicki), travels to a run-down sanatorium in the country to visit his dying father, Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat), only to be told that his father is dead.
However, the strange properties of sanatorium mean that, like Schrödinger's cat, he is also still alive. From there Józef sets off on a surreal journey into his memories, where the Jewish community he grew up in becomes interwoven with the rooms - and residents - of the sanatorium as he tries to come to terms with his guilt over leaving his father in such a place and the events that led to his father's incarceration in the first place.
The Hourglass Sanatorium (aka Sanatorium Pod Klepsydra) opens on a strange train where all the passengers, bar Józef, appear to be corpses and this unnerving Lovecraftian Hammer Horror feeling continues up until the scenes where Józef meets his father.
At first it appears as though our perfectly-normal protagonist is simply taking his increasingly peculiar surroundings in his stride, but quite suddenly we realise that Józef is as out-of-sorts with normality as everything else that is unfolding before our eyes.
Apparently based on a series of short stories by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, the film quickly dispenses with such mainstream concepts as a narrative plot and instead swims dream-like through a cycle of reality-blurring vignettes that whisk Józef from swamplands overrun by soldiers to lost loves of his youth.
The dialogue and scene structure has a strong William Burroughs 'cut-up' vibe going on and much is reminiscent of Naked Lunch (the book more so than the film, but without the sexual obsessions) mixed in with Jacob's Ladder, Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and, if I really reach, Rob Zombie's House Of 1,000 Corpses and Grant Morrison's The Invisibles.
However, this isn't a horror film so much as magical realism; an exercise in trying to capture on film a concept that this is ultimately indescribable, the experience of visiting a place where time works in ways alien to our normal perception.
Visually hypnotic and lyrically directed by Wojciech Has, The Hourglass Sanitorium is the strangest film I've seen in a long while, but it flows so beautifully and provocatively that you're soon convinced it's either incredibly meaningful or else the cast and crew were simply making it up as they went along.
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