The Hourglass Sanatorium

Here adapting multiple surreal tales by Bruno Schulz, Has concocts a fantastic time loop structure around narratives whose fabulist nature barely masks their reality in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust

It’s impossible to read Schulz’s richly imaginative prose without recalling his murder by the Gestapo in 1942. Has incorporated allusions to the Holocaust and to prewar Jewish life into his dazzling phantasmagoria, haunting moments that also echoed the anti-Semitic purges of the late 1960s.

…The Hourglass Sanatorium gains in resonance thanks to its contemporary framing. From the opening sequence, in which gaunt, wasted bodies are strewn on hay in a rickety train wagon, memories of the Final Solution permeate the picture. Even though this motif recedes until a much later scene, in which Józef peers through a basement window at his neighbors fleeing in panic, the entire film, as a meditation on death and extinction, is colored by unspeakable terror.