‘Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass’ Review: The Quay Brothers’ Surreal Stop-Motion Fantasia Is a Mouthful, an Eyeful and a Mind-Melt
variety.comGuy Lodge Film Critic Time, space and mortality work to no earthly schedule in the half-lit, hand-made twilight world of “Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” — so it’s appropriate that this vertiginous stop-motion vision seems to operate by temporal laws of its own.
The first feature film in nearly 20 years from cult animators the Quay Brothers runs just 76 minutes, though in the process of watching it, it feels both infinitely longer than that and over in the blink of an eye, like a dream of epic proportions that you forget seconds after waking.
This dark, densely nested fairytale of life, death and what comes in between is inspired by the writings of Polish literary titan Bruno Schulz, but with entirely its own collapsing, free-form model of storytelling — driven less by logic than intuitive feeling and ambience, which is where the Quays’ distinctively ethereal visuals come in.
The opaque elusiveness of “Sanatorium” may frustrate viewers who, once drawn into the vividly distressed gothic fantasy of the film’s story world, are cast adrift in a shape-shifting narrative where characters are multiplied, chronologies are bent and fused, and even death isn’t finite.
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