Rent The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973)

The Past Is Delayed - The Hourglass Sanatorium review by griggs

The Hourglass Sanatorium was recommended to me as a warm-up to a forthcoming trip to Kraków—well, if this is the vibe, I may rethink the visit! Though not set there, parts were filmed in the city, and the mood is certainly… distinctive.

Wojciech Has adapts Bruno Schulz’s surreal stories into a full-blown dreamscape. Think crumbling corridors that open into jungles, trains that lead to crypts, and time that loops, folds, and collapses. It’s visually stunning, and the sustained dream logic rivals Fellini, Tarkovsky, and Jodorowsky.

Beneath the spectacle lies something sadder: a meditation on memory, possibly even dementia, as a man wanders through fragments of his past. But while the film trades heavily on empathy and loss, it doesn’t extend the same care to its women. They’re fantasies—naked, idealised, or ignored—and even his mother barely registers.

Then there’s the lingering question of what’s missing. Schulz was Jewish, murdered by the Nazis. His mysticism remains, but the film feels filtered through a distinctly Polish Catholic lens. Is that erasure, appropriation—or just interpretation?

I’m glad I watched it. But for all its beauty, it left me uneasy—an exquisite mausoleum of memory, with some ghosts best left unburied.