There are nights when you sit down to watch a film and within a few minutes you can tell human hands built it. Not only built it but labored over it, breathed into it, argued with it, and finally let it go. You can almost see the fingerprints in the grain of the wood and hear the scuff of shoes just out of frame. That is the feeling I had with Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, the long awaited new feature from Stephen and Timothy Quay. It arrives like a relic from another age and yet it feels necessary right now, a reminder that patience and craft still matter in an art form that sometimes forgets where it came from.
The Quay brothers have been at this for close to fifty years. Pennsylvania born and based in London for most of their lives, they have carved a path that is theirs alone. Their shorts and films are a universe of their own, populated by misfit dolls, tarnished toys, broken instruments, old keys, taxidermy, and strange cabinets that seem to whisper in the dark. Their work exists in the borderland between sleeping and waking. It is theatrical and cinematic at once, but is also a cousin to dreams, folk tales, cabinet curiosities, and the smell of old paper. They have never chased trends. Instead, they have been constructing one of the most distinctive bodies of animated work in living memory, one careful frame at a time.
This new film is their third feature and the first in over twenty years. The title echoes Bruno Schulz, the visionary Polish writer whose stories feel like memories that dissolved in a glass of wine. The Quays once mapped that terrain in their landmark short Street of Crocodiles, which is still among the most influential animated films ever made. Here, they return to the well, not to illustrate but to commune. They draw from Schulz, from Kafka, from Stanislaw Lem, from Robert Walser and others, and find a language that is not literal yet somehow exact. It is not a translation. It is a conversation across time.
The premise sounds simple when you write it down. A man named Jozef boards a steam train to visit his dying father. The destination is a sanatorium far up in the Carpathian mountains, a place that seems to exist outside of ordinary minutes and hours. But of course nothing is really simple in a Quay film. The journey is a descent and an ascent. It is a station with many platforms. It is memory and dread and a child’s point of view sneaking back into an adult body. Once Jozef crosses the threshold, time does not behave the way he expects. The building is both a hospital and a museum of old selves.
The structure is remarkable. The film unfolds in seven episodes that echo one another like rooms in a house you can only enter through an odd keyhole. Each is seen through a macabre object, a glass that holds a detached retina preserved like a relic. The idea is unnerving and beautiful. This eye in a bottle seems to hold the last images witnessed by a person whose life has already ended. Perhaps it belonged to a former patient. Perhaps to Jozef. The Quays let the question hover. What matters is the sensation of looking at a world through a sight that is not fully alive, through a gaze that collects fragments, smudges, and reflections as if they were the only truths left to salvage.
Across these seven windows, Jozef meets his father again and again, but never in the same way twice. A father not yet ill. A father who has turned into an animal of habit. A father who speaks in riddles behind a curtain. A father who is both present and absent, as fathers often are when we remember them later in life. The sanatorium bends to accommodate these meetings, the furniture rearranging itself, corridors lengthening then shrinking back like an accordion, doors where doors were not. While he wanders, Jozef also stumbles into the attic of his own mind. The film is not a puzzle to solve so much as a process to endure, and that word is meant with love.
If you are looking for a tidy plot you will not find one. The Quays have never been interested in the tidy. They work more like composers and stage directors than screenwriters. The films feel like elaborate stage pieces in miniature, built on sets that could sit on a table until the camera moves and the table becomes a landscape. Their narratives do not climb a hill and drop down into a resolution. They coil and bloom. They repeat and revise, not to stall but to deepen. This is art that trusts you to follow a rhythm and be moved by a gesture, by a light falling across a face made of porcelain, by a coil of copper wire spinning for reasons known only to it.
Sound is not an accessory here. It is the other half of the film. Over the years the Quays have collaborated with musicians who like to test the edges of harmony. You hear the echo of Lech Jankowski and Karlheinz Stockhausen in the way the tracks lean into strange pulses and long drones, into scratches that become language and language that falls into a kind of music. For this film Timothy Nelson returns to write the score. He wraps the images in low strings, in iron bells, in whispers that might be wind but are not. The foley work is a world of its own. A single hinge complains for a lifetime. A glass bead rolls and you feel your own teeth hurt. The soundtrack sits under the images like a river, carrying you whether you want to move or not.
The animation is largely stop motion, which the brothers use like painters use oil. You can feel the resistance of the medium. Wood resists. Cloth resists. Dust has its own opinion about everything. The camera glides and peers and waits. Here and there they fold a human gesture into the miniature worlds. A hand enters. An eye opens. A figure in the distance turns with that slow attention that the living have when they are unsure they are awake. Those sudden touches of live action are not a gimmick. They act like flares that tell you the scale might not be what you thought it was.
For a current point of reference, people will probably say this most resembles Phil Tippett’s Mad God, which is also an epic of handmade art that sprawled out across decades of patient work. The comparison is fair as far as form goes. But once you sit with both, the differences feel clear. Tippett’s film is a howl from the gut, a gritty and sometimes gleefully dirty expedition into the muck. The Quays are after something quieter and more cerebral here. Their film is less interested in shock and more in the slow thaw of feeling. If Mad God is a descent into a furnace, the Quays have built a study with many locked drawers and a window that looks onto a winter field.
There are moments that stick with you even if you are not sure what they mean. The opening sequence stages an auction that could only happen in a dream. An excitable auctioneer rattles through his lots and what he is selling are not chairs or clocks or silver. He is selling what he calls dead seasons. He is offering shares in regions of the Great Heresy, as if forbidden ideas could be divvied up and held up to the light. The scene is funny and unmooring. It announces the rules of the game, or maybe it announces that there will not be rules. That the economy of the film is unlike ours. Time can be put on a block. Memory can be traded. Belief can be measured out with a wooden ruler that is never quite straight.
From there the film returns over and over to the practice of looking. The preserved retina is not just a clever conceit. It is the film teaching you how to watch. It asks what it means to see a last image and whether the last things you see become a kind of kingdom you must carry. It suggests that the final look back may not be an image of family gathered around a bed. It may be a corner of a room. A bit of wallpaper. A moth. The curved edge of a glass jar. The Quays have always been lovers of details that the rest of us step over. They build a cosmos out of crumbs. It feels right that their portal would be a bit of anatomy saved from a body.
Every encounter Jozef has with his father brings a slightly different atmosphere. The film understands the way our parents multiply inside us. We keep versions of them at different ages and in different moods, and those versions do not always agree. The sanatorium is a perfect setting because it is a place where time is both kept and lost. Time is measured in doses and drips. Time is heard in the slow shuffle of slippers at three in the morning. But time also grows porous. You can forget whether it is morning or evening. The mountain air outside does not recognize the schedule posted by the reception desk. All of that texture becomes part of the fabric of the movie.
The production design is tactile in a way that makes your fingers itch. Handles, threads, screws, dried flowers, feathers, slices of tin, the kinds of things you find in drawers in old houses that no one has opened in decades. The camera treats these as actors. They have lines and moods. The light is not merely illumination. It is a character that arrives late to the scene and leans in to listen. The Quays attend to tiny motions, to the micro dramas of sway and creak, until they feel as momentous as a thunderclap. You begin to believe a string can decide to leave a knot. And when it does, it changes everything.
There is also the sense of legacy, and of a particular tradition of art from central and eastern Europe. Puppet theater, shadow play, collage animation, and the lingering influence of a century of literature that came out of cities where borders kept changing and languages overlapped. The Quays never imitate those sources. They live with them the way you live with old friends who challenge you to be stranger and braver. For all the talk of influence, their voice is finally their own. You can see it in a single frame, the way you can recognize a composer after a few bars.
None of this will satisfy someone who insists that a movie must explain itself as it goes. The film is not set up to decode itself for you. That is not a failure. It is a choice. It believes that sensation and memory can lead the way and that your intellect will catch up later if it needs to. Many scenes wash over you and only afterward do they snap into a shape you could put into a sentence. Others do not snap at all. They remain as a feeling at the edge of your vision. You get the sense it is best approached that way, through the corners of the eye, because looking straight at it might cause it to go still.
The music keeps guiding you back in. Timothy Nelson writes with a deep awareness of the scale of the images. He knows how to let a single tone fill a room and make it seem larger than it is. He knows when not to write. Silence here is never empty. It is full of tiny noises the film captures with greedy ears. A scrape. A cough. The sticky sound of paper lifting off another piece of paper. These are not ornaments. They are essential, as important as any line of dialogue would be in a more talkative movie. You feel your own breathing adjusting to the tempo.
The ending does not resolve the way a tidy drama would. It cleans nothing up. It offers a climax that feels both inevitable and also alarming, like a story you knew as a child that took a turn you forgot about until now. I will not describe the imagery for people who prefer to discover it themselves. What I can say is that the air in the theater changed. People sat very still as the last minutes unspooled. When the lights came up, there was a pause before anyone moved. It reminded me that you can watch something and be unable to talk about it for a few minutes because talking would be like turning on a bright light in a room where your eyes just adjusted to the dark.
It would be easy to declare this film a defense of craft for its own sake, and in a sense it is. You can see the labor. But the labor is never a slogan. It is the medium. It is the soul of the work. The care that goes into the building of these tiny worlds translates into a particular kind of feeling on screen, a tenderness even in the presence of ruin. The film loves matter. It loves the way objects age and how they keep their dignity even when they no longer serve their makers. In a moment when so much can be conjured with a few strokes on a keyboard, there is something moving about art that requires time in the old way. Time spent. Time risked. Time given.
As a viewer, you do not need a guidebook to the symbols. There is plenty to interpret if you enjoy doing that. The auctioneer, the vitrines with their secret eyes, the names of rooms, the curious bits of text that appear like notes pinned to a wall no one can reach. The references to other writers are there if you want to hunt for them. But I think the deeper pleasure is in letting the film affect you before you try to make sense of it. The understanding follows the feeling. And sometimes it does not follow at all. That is fine too. Not everything needs to be pressed flat and labeled.
It is worth saying plainly that there is really no one else who could have made this. The Quays have honed their own grammar and their own sense of time. They are not perfect artists, and this is not a perfect film, but the soul in it is unmistakable. They carry with them a lifetime of apprenticeship, experiment, failure, and stubborn belief that this odd way of making pictures can still move people. This is what you see when artists stay true to the thing that only they can do. It feels fragile and stubborn at the same time. It has a spine of iron.
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is a challenge and a gift. It speaks the way an old clock might speak if it learned your language for a single night. It has rooms you may not visit on the first pass. It has jokes tucked in the rafters. It has shadows that do not belong to anything you can name. The film the film waits for you to meet it halfway. That is rare now. And when you meet it, when you climb into its carriage and let the steam and cinders sting your eyes, you come away grateful that two artists still have the patience to set a stage, light a modest lamp, and ask us to look again. Not because they want to lecture us about the past but because they know that looking closely is one way to be fully alive.
If you can find a screening, consider making the trip. Sit near the middle. Let the sound do its work. Try not to be in a hurry. It is, honestly, hard to explain why it works so well, but it does. You will walk out into the ordinary night and the streetlights will look a little different. Maybe only for a few minutes. Long enough. Long enough to remember that cinema can still be made by artisans who move through the world with their eyes open, gathering small things, and building from them something that feels true. Something you can carry with you the way you carry a last image in the mind. A small circle of light held up to the dark. A human work, and proud of it.
