I have seen many weird, strange, bizarre, obscure, surreal and symbolic films, but nothing could ever be compared to The Hourglass Sanatorium. This Eastern European surrealistic movie would probably tear apart the sanity of people like Satoshi Kon or David Lynch (they aren't sane anyways but you know what I mean).

As a critical and hard-to-please person, I often express disapproval of films that I find them too obscure or incoherent; I would simply say it's just some artsy pretentious, experimental nonsense films; but the hourglass sanatorium was something else. After the second attempt to watch this movie, I have to admit this is so much profound than it appears, and I'm unable to fully grasp this dreamlike story. Still I was confused throughout many scenes, indeed, but happily confused. The inexplicable uncertainty of it has brought a strange sense of comfort to me. The movie took place in a sanatorium where time itself does not exist or function in a linear way, space is continually distorted. This creates a perfect blend between realism and surrealism, death and life, truth and myth, past and present. However, instead of being a place for patients to recover, this sanatorium did the exact opposite, it takes away the sanity of whoever dares to visit it. The hourglass itself is also a versatile symbol and may be interpreted differently, but I believe it shows that time (the sand) could flow through the neck of it from side to side, from the past to the present, dreams to reality, life to death and vice versa. The neck of the hourglass is exactly the sanatorium, a place which lies between everywhere and not belong to anywhere at the same time.

The surrealism and symbolism of the film are mostly the contributors to the distortion of one's sanity in the sanatorium; and it's portrayed throughout the film with mesmerizing, stunning, artsy scenes mixed with the dark, lonely and melacholic ones. There are many ways to explain this film, and I believe it's an openly ambiguous film, so here's my explanation of it:

⚠️ Spoiler warning ⚠️

The sanatorium is a living creature, just like The Zone (Stalker) or The Shimmer (Annihilation). At first I didn't suspect much about it, since the doctor explained the non linearity of time here as "late by an interval", "boils down to relativity", but later on I started to see the hedonistic naked women, the comforted religious men, the heroic adventure of Jozef to rescue Bianka; that's when I know The Sanatorium is trying to lure him to stay there longer and longer with all of these alluring things, until his mind is fully distorted and become another prisoner working for it ("our patients don't suspect anything. They can't."); which eventually happened (Jozef became blind and started wearing the same outfit as the blind train conductor (another victim) in the movie). Jozef did realize that but it's too late ("we're evidently in a trap"). Now Jozef's job is to transport new victims to The Sanatorium, and he will also get replaced one day. About the doctor and the nurse, they could work under the permission of the sanatorium, collaborate with it or maybe own it; and that's somehow they could exist in that place and do not be affected by anything. I'm convinced that they are demonic creatures (exists outside the place where all the men singing and cheering up for their god); they also have sex everytime they are together and never do anything that helps the patients here. And now you might wonder the purpose of all of this, the sanatorium, the nurse and the doctor, the answer is showed in the very last quote:

"Do we get fully valuable and credible time here? No. We get time used up by people. It's frayed and full of holes. It's vommited, secondhand time!"

These creatures exist by consume other people's time (to gain immortality). Time for the victims in here is no longer something pure, new, and authentic; their time has been firstly consumed, used up by those creatures, and then regurgitated for them. That's why time in here is always late by an interval, but not for those creatures because they were the one that caused this mess and ate that amount of time. Think of time as a line, someone cut a part of it, eat that part, regurgitate it and later they put it back to the same position. Now this new line of time (timeline lol) will start to develop on its own way and stack over the old timeline. This is why Jozef saw himself coming to the sanatorium again at the beginning of the film. And yep that's all of my review :)! 

"Unfortunately, Adela, you never understood things which go beyong the mundane"

"There are some things that cant fully happen. They are too grand and magnificent to fit into an event. They just try to happen."