A train carries a young man to a sanatorium where time itself has broken down, where the dead are only somewhat dead, kept alive by a delay in the clocks. He has come to see his father, who died years ago, and who is, in this place, still dying, over and over, in a room that never quite ends.

THE HOURGLASS SANATORIUM (1973), or Sanatorium pod Klepsydrą, follows Józef through corridors that open onto his own memories, dreams, and childhood terrors. Jan Nowicki plays Józef, wandering rooms full of wax figures, fallen soldiers, and a father, Jakub, played by Tadeusz Kondrat, who slips between life and death depending on which door Józef opens next.

Wojciech Has directed and co-wrote the film with source material by Bruno Schulz, the Polish-Jewish writer murdered by a Gestapo officer in 1942. Schulz's fiction, dense with decayed grandeur and Jewish provincial life, becomes here a cascade of tableaux: a runaway train of corpses, a blind conductor playing to no one, a synagogue overtaken by birds.

Gustaw Holoubek appears as Dr. Gotard, the sanatorium's keeper, presiding over a place where death is administered in installments rather than delivered outright.

Has shot the film in Poland under state production, and it won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1973.