Venice 2024 review: Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Brothers Quay)

Sanatorium is a triumphant return to long-form cinema for the Brothers Quay, a beguiling and intoxicating dreamscape in a place where time moves in more than one direction.”

Stephen and Timothy Quay, American twin brothers colloquially known as the Brothers Quay, have been a staple in stop-motion animation for nigh on five decades, the unique style and atmosphere of their films setting them apart from most other works in this field. Although they have only two full-length features to their name (the 1995 ‘debut’ Institute Benjamenta, or This Dream People Call Human Life and 2005’s The PianoTuner of Earthquakes), their extensive list of shorts, music videos, commercials, and even stage design have cemented their names as veritable legends. Their mixture of stop-motion work with live action footage, dreamlike and surrealist, and tinged with a philosophical streak, caters to an audience that is attracted by their particular dark and gothic style that harkens to an early 20th century era and the place of nightmarish folk tales. With influences ranging from Franz Kafka to Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Švankmajer, it is perhaps not surprising that their work often conjures up a Central Europe of a bygone time, a crumbling world on the brink of death where one has to duck for the cobwebs and be sure not to leave a trail in the dust.

It is no different in their long-awaited third feature Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, in which the rather minimal narrative of a man visiting his father in a remote sanatorium where the old man is somehow still alive even though by all earthly measures he is dead, is more than made up for by the Quays’ stupendous and meticulous animation work, and the moody atmosphere of a dark fairy tale. Based on a novel by Polish writer Bruno Schulz, another big influence on the brothers, Sanatorium is a triumphant return to long-form cinema for the Brothers Quay, a beguiling and intoxicating dreamscape in a place where time moves in more than one direction.

The story of Sanatorium is framed by a purveyor in particular paraphernalia, who deals in such items as three petrified ribs of a Siren or the warm blood of bees. His excitement rises when he lays his hands on a unique object: a wooden box with seven lenses, which purportedly contains the dried-out retinas of the previous owner of the box. One day a year, when the light is right, these retinas will liquify and looking through the lenses will show the owner the last seven images imprinted in them.

On an obscure train line through Galicia’s mountains, Jozef is on his way to a remote sanatorium on the edge of a dark forest. There he hopes to find his father before the latter’s imminent death. After a cold arrival he is left to his own devices, roaming the empty, dusty hallways in search of a sign of his father. Eventually he meets the questionable Doctor Gotard, who explains that Jozef’s father may be dead in the world outside the walls of the dilapidated sanatorium, but in his domain is still lingering between the living and the dead because time repeats itself at intervals.

The Quays’ unique style of animation, in which most of their puppets but also the decor are made of recycled and repurposed materials of all kinds, is on full display in this spooky tale of memory and vision. Pebbles, pieces of blackboard chalk, bird feathers, even (rather nasty looking) organic material are incorporated into their diorama world to make it more tangible and somehow more ‘real’. Their films are notoriously dark, and Sanatorium is no exception, which helps create its eerie atmosphere and the thematic idea of memory as a dusty world you have to grope your way through. Memories are incomplete and fleeting, represented by the live action scenes that repeat like broken records on an old gramophone. These scenes have a touch of noir and more than a whiff of German Expressionism, again a perfect fit for the surrealist world of writers like Schulz or Kafka. The idea that these were some of the last images imprinted on the retinas of the deceased person, who could be either Jozef himself or his father, begs the question: are we in the mind of someone on the plane between life and death, where everything is a maelstrom of memories and dark visions? This would shed a new light, even in this twilight world, on the characters of Doctor Gotard and a creature that seems to be an assistant of sorts, but has a devilish face. To be fair, the film is cryptic enough to make interpretation as treacherous a path as finding your way through a decrepit sanatorium, and at times Sanatorium feels more like an experimental film without a semblance of narrative thrust. It is hard to get full insight into the film, ironic given that the film’s leitmotif, an excerpt from Alfred Schnittke’s score for the ’60s Russian film Die Kommissarin from which Sanatorium uses more pieces, is named exactly that (Einsicht). But perhaps it is exactly Schnittke’s gorgeous piece of music that carries the film through its most lyrical sequence that informs us on how to enjoy the Quays’ cerebral masterpiece: a visceral journey through a magical dreamworld in which time stands still, but animated cinema takes an important step forward.