In the past few months, I have watched 3 older movies from Eastern Europe and I was only able to sort of enjoy one. But this Polish movie from the 70s is easily the worst of all. I think I will simply stop watching older movies from Eastern Europe with the only exception of this film called Russian Ark that I plan to watch soon, but this one is from 2002 so it is actually not that old.
In The Hourglass Sanatorium, we have an adult man going to a sanatorium to visit his dying father. The train to that asylum was very weird looking and I suppose it could symbolize many things, like for example, the travel between a living state and a dead one. I guess this movie is full of symbolic meanings and abstract ideas such as different behavior in time itself. But it does so, not in a very entertaining way but in a bizarre, slow and tiresome way.
When the main character arrives in this sanatorium he finds this place in a very bad state, the walls are ugly, there are unpruned bushes and everything looked as if no one was taking care of the place, I felt it was a good setting for a horror movie but I knew this was no horror flick.
Soon after the guy arrives, he speaks with the doctor who shares a little explanation about the nature of this place. Everything looked very intriguing and we also see the main character watching himself from the window as he was arriving into this place, with the difference that now he is watching him entering through the door while a few minutes ago he entered through the window. After these first minutes of authentic intrigue, the film starts to degenerate itself into a complete mess.
The movie links places and scenes that are in no way related to each other, and it does so with indifference. The movie is one absurdity after the next one and is more like a crazy dream physically manifested in a film rather than a real film meant to be viewed by actual people.
If you are interested in seeing strange movies where dream-like sequences mix with mindless fantasy in a place where time doesn't behave normally, then well you should check this movie but I would guess most people aren't interested in anything like that.
The best
- The beginning had an eerie look.
The worst
- Messy plot with no clear direction.
- The movie lasts too long and delivers little.
More information: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070628/ Review: AA In numbers: 5/10