“Is time too tight to take in all events?” So asks Józef, whose visit to see his dead – yet impossibly still living – father in the titular sanatorium serves as a rich canvas for this expressive and confounding traversal of memory, time and death. Adapting stories from Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass by Jewish author Bruno Schulz – whose work so obsessed Has in his own childhood – Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą reworks the text into something far less linear, collaging together different parts of Schulz’s stories with a logic that rhymes, stretches and contracts. As Józef navigates the Sanatorium (where the seemingly solitary doctor tells him time is “moved back”), each room seems to throw him headlong into warped childhood memories, formative sexual experiences, and fairy tale riddles, all in impossible spaces linked to one another by editing that relies on dream logic rather than geography. Formally seductive – and grimly funny – even as one is unbalanced by its confrontational and confounding surrealism and narrative illogic, the film is shot through by Has and cinematographer Witold Sobociński in wintry blues and greens; beautiful, but evocative of the oppressive, fatal sense of doom that lurks ever present throughout the film. Despite not having a reputation for being as overtly political as some of his peers, Has is here no less in dialogue with the history of twentieth century Poland. Surreal allusions to the Holocaust abound, appearing suddenly with little fanfare, juxtaposed with scenes of pre- WWII Poland drawn from Schulz’s text and Has’s own memory. The immediate history of Poland shatters on screen beyond comprehension. Deaths and tragedies, both personal and collective, permeate every frame of the film. Perhaps then, the constraints of linear narrative logic were, for Has, “too tight to take in all these events”. Rather, they needed to be refracted, made nonsense of, made dreamlike in order to be processed.

Will Watt