Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

“The Quay Brothers’ Surreal Stop-Motion Fantasia Is a Mouthful, an Eyeful and a Mind-Melt. Alluring, confounding and fully sui generis.” – Variety

“Masters above all of an unusually entrancing form of stop motion animation.”– The New York Times

“To enter the impossible, haunted night of a Quay Brothers film is to become complicit in one of the most perverse and obsessive acts of cinema.”– Film Comment

A ghostly train journey on a forgotten branch line transports a son, Jozef, visiting his dying Father in a remote Galician Sanatorium. Upon arrival, Jozef finds the Sanatorium entirely moribund and run by a dubious Doctor Gotard, who tells him that his father’s death, the death that has struck him in his country, has not yet occurred and that here they are always late by a certain interval of time of which the length cannot be defined. Jozef will come to realize that the Sanatorium is a floating world halfway between sleep and wakefulness and that time and events cannot be measured in any tangible form.