A young doctor at a rural mental hospital struggles to uphold humane standards and deal with the staff, including aloof doctors, an eccentric poet, and a cynic with whom he falls in love. Their troubled sanctuary then faces even harder decisions—and a real dystopia—with the arrival of the Nazis.

While best known as a visionary futurologist, Stanisław Lem didn’t just look to the stars. This adaptation of his first novel uses the microcosm of a sanatorium to allegorize 1930s Poland, before the arrival of the Nazi machine elucidates the sheer inadequacy of metaphor in the face of atrocity.