Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass

It’s the type of animation that only Stephen and Timothy Quay, two extraordinary masters of their craft, could have conceived, a testament to a shared lifetime of dedication, artistry, and uncompromising vision. It is an undeniably (and inimitably) human work of art.

In his impressive feature-length debut, the Irish documentarian Gar O’Rourke offers an immersive and mesmerising portrait of life in a still recognisably Soviet institution.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass becomes a film about its own condition of being an outsider to its own time, lost as it is in the aesthetics of another time that it views with a kind of nostalgic disquiet.

It’s a film of sensations and mystery that feels like it’s wafting toward us from another century, like much of the Quays’ work, channeling uncanny realms of Central European puppetry.