Movie Recommendation: Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass
Dir. Timothy & Stephen Quay, 2024
I don't watch movies with the mindset of providing a critical review or seeking movies to write about. Rather these recommendation posts reflect moments I finished watching a movie and felt driven to tell the world about it!
I only recommend movies I'm excited about and eager for you to see.
Three years ago I wrote a Movie Recommendation for Mad God by Phil Tippett where I said,
this is not a “they don’t make films like this anymore” situation, this is a “they don’t make films like this” situation. Movies like this come along once a generation — literally. Phil Tippett had been producing Mad God off and on as a passion project for over 30 years.
Indeed, here is another dark fantasia in stop-motion animation that is literally once in a generation, in the sense that it took the Brothers Quay 20 years to produce. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass is another take on the brothers’ beloved Bruno Schulz, in feature format instead of a short, and a project they’ve dedicated themselves to through decades of funding issues and production stoppages. The sheer dedication to get this done is sufficient enough to sing their praises. The magnificent result is just the cherry on top.
And yet, just like all their other work, this movie is being given an extremely limited release. So it behooves you to run, not walk, if you manage to have an opportunity to attend a screening somewhere around you; and if you have a local independent theatre, to request it. For the Quay brothers’ timelessness in result, their products become all too ephemeral.
Storywise, Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass follows a puppet named Jozef, whose father dies on a train. Jozef then arrives at a sanatorium in which time has a tendency to lapse and hats have a tendency to fall to the ceiling and dance away. Jozef is promised by a six-armed puppet that his father can be seen again in a suitcase that unfolds into full-scale diorama, within which a trickster puppet with a fondness for tying knots lives. Meanwhile a live action nurse wanders around the hallways of the Sanatorium, occasionally giving cryptic advice and generally doing perverse sounding things behind closed doors, and the full story is overseen by a live action auctioneer and his assistant as a playback in a camera obscura device designed to burn away the preserved retina of its designer.
What does it all mean? It doesn’t matter. In the Quay brothers’ world, you’re in equal parts dreamland and “Pure Cinema”-scape. Characters are always looking through holes, apertures, lenses, around corners, to see various bric-a-brac produce precinematic optical effects — in this movie there’s even a stereogram. There’s an ongoing thematic joke the Quay brothers play against their characters, in that the objects that surround the puppets tend to move contrary to their expectations or attempts to bring them to order. With the Quay brothers controlling every level of design, modelling, and motion of every element on frame, it’s a perversely pleasurable irony that their stories tend to show that objects resist being controlled.
It’s that visual irony + creepiness of the puppets design and motion that makes this movie such a treat to just sit back and indulge in.
This is their third feature. I have not seen Institute Benjamenta, but I have The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes on DVD. A big question about the Brothers Quay’s overall style is the question of whether the surreal and confusingly-plotted shorts could stand up to a feature length treatment.
Piano Tuner of Earthquakes didn’t really sell me on the concept, though I like it enough. Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass absolutely hits that metric. This is the feature I’ve wanted to see from them for forever. Save for an overly long take near the beginning of the auctioneer on a rooftop, I had no feeling of dragging or being drawn out, just sheer uncut wonder at each unfolding of the Quays’ giant frame-by-frame cabinet of curiosities.
This movie is just so damn special, you gotta check it out as soon as you can.
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