Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: Dream Labyrinth

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, an adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s short story, is the third feature-length film by the Brothers Quay, whose careers truly took off with the screen adaptation of another work by the writer from Drohobych.

The story was first published in 1935 in the literary magazine Wiadomości Literackie, and two years later appeared in a collection of the same title, published by Rój. The book was met with great interest from both readers and critics. Writers like Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, Artur Sandauer, Zofia Nałkowska, and Julian Tuwim praised Schulz’s prose with enthusiasm. Though negative reviews also emerged, they didn’t prevent the writer from receiving the Golden Laurel of the Polish Academy of Literature in 1938—a prestigious literary award.

After the outbreak of World War II, Schulz remained in his hometown, which was occupied by the Nazis in the summer of 1941. In November 1942, he was shot and killed by the Nazis. After the war, under Stalinist rule, his work was essentially sentenced to obscurity. A revival began in the late 1950s, when The Cinnamon Shops and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass were reissued. Today, there is little doubt that Schulz was one of the most remarkable and original writers of the interwar period.

The first attempt to adapt Schulz’s prose to film was made in 1973 by Wojciech Jerzy Has, who directed The Hourglass Sanatorium with Jan Nowicki as Józef. Decades later, the same story was taken up by Timothy and Stephen Quay—masters of stop-motion animation who had already drawn on Schulz’s legacy with Street of Crocodiles (1986), based on a story from The Cinnamon Shops.

Work on Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass took nearly two decades, as no one initially wanted to fund the film. Before receiving support from Polish Television and the British Film Institute, the Quays filmed independently in their London studio, crafting elaborate sets, props, and puppets (including a 30-centimeter-tall figure of Józef). In line with their established method, the Quays composed each shot to the rhythm of music written in advance by Timothy Nelson.

Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass combines live action and stop-motion animation. It was produced primarily with a Polish crew and cast, including Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopańska, Andrzej Kłak, and Leszek Bzdyl.

Schulz’s dreamlike prose, blurring the line between wakefulness and sleep, reality and hallucination, life and death, seems tailor-made for the Quay brothers—animators with boundless imagination and a flair for constructing strange, fantastical worlds. The result is another triumph for the twins: a film steeped in dark atmosphere and esoteric symbolism. It’s a variation on Schulz’s story and a tribute to the writer, visible even in the “face” of Józef, which bears a resemblance to Schulz himself, and in a loaf of bread he holds in one scene—a reference to accounts suggesting that Schulz was killed while out fetching bread.

Stunning animated sequences merge seamlessly with monochrome live-action shots in the style of German Expressionism. The creators also integrated Schulz’s poetic prose, richly embedding the film with fragments from his stories—not just the titular one. This visual design—with its high-contrast black and white, painterly sets, and character movement—feels like a fingerprint, or the iris of an eye: utterly unique.

Narratively, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is not a literal adaptation of Schulz’s work—such a thing would be impossible—but it fully captures its extraordinary spirit. Like the literary original, the film is enigmatic, impenetrable, visionary, and carries the impact of a phantasmagorical experience. Despite excerpts of Schulz’s text, it lacks a traditional narrative structure. Instead, it presents a procession of hypnotic moving images in perfect harmony with the soundtrack.

It is astonishing how precisely the Quays have brought to life the world Schulz imagined nearly a century ago: not only the vanished pre-war Galician town and the titular sanatorium—where time flows differently and patients hover between life and death—but also the inner world of the protagonist: a labyrinth of dreams and memories marked by longing and a deep, unspoken fear.

Stephen and Timothy Quay have done justice to Schulz’s literature: they materialized it and transformed it into visions straight from a dream—disturbing and breathtakingly beautiful.