A man named Józef (Jan Nowicki) is on a train heading to a remote location. His destination is a mental institution, and his reason for finding himself there is to visit his father, Jakub (Tadeusz Kondrat), who is on the verge of death. Far from being the rehabilitation centre the protagonist expected it to be, the sanatorium is a decaying mansion without any discernible authority or sense of reason. Jakub is apparently some significant figure – the doctor and the nurse (who appear to be the only other people employed at the institution) mention how his death must be kept from the other patients. However,  Józef is not sure whether or not his father has actually passed on, or if he is only on the precipice, being kept alive as long as possible. This is inconsequential, because the longer the protagonist stays in the sanatorium, the more twisted and deranged his experience, as he begins to venture into a labyrinthine world that resembles locations from his childhood, each room leading down into another corridor of his memory, as we watch him try and make sense of his surroundings, which start to distort into uncanny visions of his past, each moment revealing something either profound or sinister about Józef as a character, and those he grew up around.

Wojciech Jerzy Has made a film that challenges so much of what the audience normally expects from a narrative film. The Hourglass Sanatorium (Polish: Sanatorium pod klepsydrą) is a daring fantasy drama that presents the audience with one of the most difficult cinematic experiences they could hope to have, but one that is supremely rewarding, because much like the story at the centre, this is a layered film, and the further we venture into it, the more enriching and powerful the sensations become, as Has relishes in his incredible ability to evoke all the primary senses in a way that is superb and utterly original. A film that finds its basis in surrealism and its relationship with reality, The Hourglass Sanatorium is dark and twisted, but also a quietly joyful film about revisiting the past, never taking on the status of being pretentious or nonsensical, but being an ultimately unforgettable piece of postmodern fiction that takes the audience on a wild journey into the mind of a protagonist who is not only just as confused as us, but also just as transfixed on the intersecting moments of memorial clarity and perverted fantasy, making this one of the most highly original films of the 1970s, and a brilliantly disturbing surreal masterwork.

There’s the famous adage taken from Dante’s Inferno that is often quoted as “abandon all hope, you who enter here” – and I feel that’s a good warning for all potential viewers of The Hourglass Sanatorium, as this is not an easy film. Far from being controversial or disturbing in any traditional sense, it is rather a film that is undoubtedly going to force us to question a lot of what narrative fiction sets out to do. This is surrealism in its finest form – we are taken into a world that resembles our own, but one that is slightly off-kilter, and also contains seemingly limitless possibilities. Based on a short story collection by Bruno Schulz, this film is a metaphysical odyssey into the nucleus of the human mind, whereby Has makes his intentions very clear as to where he is going to lead his audience. The Hourglass Sanatorium exists in a world where nothing is what it seems, which will naturally go against our innate tendency to contextualize absolutely everything. This is the type of artwork that makes less sense the more one tries to rationalize what we are viewing, which is a difficult concept, but one that Has manages to convincingly execute, to the point where it is almost astoundingly brilliant how absurdly puzzling this film is. In the world of The Hourglass Sanatorium, death is not death, reality is fiction and our final destination just may not exist. It contains a bizarre dismissal of all logic, yet it never bewilders the audience to the point where it is alienating. It is a work of uncompromising brilliance, one that embraces its preposterousness and takes it to the point of becoming a sheer masterpiece.

The Hourglass Sanatorium occurs in an otherworldly realm, a world not even Lewis Carroll in all his opium-soaked genius could have imagined. There are two central locations in this film, the first being the titular sanatorium, where our protagonist finds himself after a long and mysterious train journey. The institution bears a strong resemblance, at least in narrative terms, to the house at the core of another metamodern masterpiece, Celine and Julie Go Boating, which similarly looks at a character entering into what seems like a building, but actually serves to be something much deeper, a portal into another dimension. In the sanatorium, Józef finds himself struggling to make sense of his surroundings, and he soon realizes that the deeper you go, the more lost you get, and the longer you spend inside this location, which occupies some ambigious space in time and logic, the less you understand, and the more unfamiliar things start to become. The idea of a location taking the form of a character is something that has always been of particular interest, as the use of space not only to supplement a story, but also define it, has been something that hearkens back to the silent era, where the surroundings tell just as much of a story as the characters themselves. Has brilliantly never gives us any answers, and by never deviating out of the sanatorium throughout the entirety of the film (other than the opening sequence that sees the main character arriving), he evokes the central message that nothing in this film is supposed to make sense, and that there really is no such concept of a particular place or time in this world. Eventually unfolding into a gorgeously chaotic series of moments, all set within this mystical location, The Hourglass Sanatorium abandon all logic in the most effective way possible.

The second location – and this is where the true absurdity of this film truly kicks in – is the mind of the main character. The film calls into question whether or not Józef is actually going to a physical location, or if he himself is losing his mind, with the film being an elegy towards his deteriorating mental state. Throughout the film, it is very clear that Józef is searching for his father, almost taking on the form of a postmodern Orpheus, descending into some mental underworld, in search of his own Eurydice. Logically, this would take the form of his father, whose ambigious state between life and death is the reason why the protagonist is venturing to a remote mental institution. Like every hero on a quest, Józef finds himself going down enigmatic pathways that only become more convoluted and disconcerting the further he ventures down them, encountering a variety of strange individuals, many of whom embody the insurmountable challenges he needs to find a way around, in order to reach a mysterious destination. The representation of the mind as a mental institution is already quite an audacious concept, and Has’ approach to the original book, whereby he combines Schulz’ myriad of stories into a single fragmented narrative as a way of representing the labyrinth of the mind, is exceptional, and gives this film a certain disassociative brilliance. The Hourglass Sanatorium takes the form of a constant stream of random thoughts and vague memories that have been manipulated over the course of time, converging into a chaotic but rich tapestry of the mind of a man who is very slowly descending into an unsettling version of madness.

The Hourglass Sanatorium is a daring film and one that truly makes a concerted effort to realize its strange premise in a way that makes the complex ideas palatable without necessarily losing the mystique of the storyline. Whether being anchored by Nowicki’s extraordinary performance, whereby he oscillates between a sensible audience surrogate, a surrogate through which we can perceive these often bewildering situations, and as a man descending into his own form of madness, he is brilliant, and nothing about this performance comes across as anything other than entirely authentic from beginning to end, handling the sometimes very difficult material with a certain simple elegance that never betrays the narrative oddities. Has deserves credit for his vision as well, through his ability to evoke this strange and mysterious world in a way that is visually beautiful without being necessarily extravagant – the film alternates between broadly exuberant, such as in an early scene where Józef finds himself surrounded by human-sized birds (foreshadowing for a later scene), and hopelessly bleak. The director makes it a rich and memorable experience to have these deranged and provocative sequences presented to us, both through the gorgeous visuals and the constant genre shifts, whereby the film defies all categorization, harbouring elements of dark comedy, existential drama and even some brief moments of unhinged horror. It all converges into one of the most uncomfortable but hauntingly beautiful explorations of the human spirit and a spellbinding portrayal of the debris of memory.