The Hourglass Sanatorium

The first screen adaptation of Bruno Schulz’s novella is an opulently strange trip through a Polish-Jewish looking-glass.

Has’ second best-known film is this hallucinatory masterpiece, which filters Bruno Schulz’s elliptical novella through the writer-director’s own familiar obsessions. When Józef visits his father in a sanatorium, he finds out that it’s a portal to a world based as much on Józef’s fears and long-suppressed memories (not least of a long-vanished Jewish Poland) as it is on any kind of objective reality.