FILM OF THE WEEK: Sanatorium - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

Ireland’s submission for the Best International Feature Film for next year’s Academy Awards is Galway director Gar O’Rourke’s Sanatorium, a luminous documentary that finds humour and tenderness in a place most might overlook. A subtle and gentle film, O’Rourke invites us into the world of an aging health retreat on the outskirts of Odesa, where daily life carries on in the shadow of war.

O’Rourke creates something rare: a portrait of resilience that is neither sentimental nor grim. It's a story that highlights the ordinary joys of living, even when sirens sound in the background. The Kuialnyk sanatorium, once a Soviet-era monument to collective health, becomes a living metaphor for a country trying to heal. Its corridors and mud baths, its pools and peeling plaster, its one grand now run-down facilities are characters in themselves, harbouring a community bound together by routine, humour, and an understated faith in the future.

O’Rourke keeps the violence of the wider conflict outside the frame, but never out of mind. Instead, he turns to the people who gather to sing karaoke, to seek fertility treatment, to recover from trauma or find companionship. Their voices are sometimes weary, often playful, always candid. A mother and son enjoy a dance together. A widow finds comfort in conversation on a bench. A woman dreams of children as a promise of what still might come. These individual threads are woven into something profound, made all the more so of our awareness of the war affecting every person in the country, and the layers of this impact unfurl over the course of the film.

We do not see violence, but air sirens do go off. They're so routine to life now that people complain about them. Women – and there are more women than men, with so many men having been drafted to fight – discuss their losses, and how it feels to have the fate of your country in the hands of men. Amid the visitors seeking wellness, a veteran seeks rehabilitation for his injuries. He delivers some of the most impactful lines of the documentary, eschewing war narratives that romanticise or glorify war. “Books are often written by those who didn’t live with war. It’s a dirty, dead and unnecessary business... there's nothing exciting or romantic about it,” he remarks, reminding us of the important responsibility Gar O’Rourke holds.

Sanatorium lingers on the geometry of Soviet architecture, with a cinematography style that has shades of Wes Anderson. There are symmetrical shots of the fading pastel hues of the tiled walls and broad façades, but it never fetishises decay. Instead, there is a searching for beauty in spaces that might otherwise feel forgotten. The score, with its playful echoes of 1970s spa muzak, deepens this effect, drawing the viewer into a world that is at once faint, absurd, aching and human.

What makes the film linger is its sense of humour. O’Rourke understands how laughter can exist alongside grief. It can even be a form of survival, and the characters are tender and often funny. If resilience is the spine of the film, hope is its heart. The quasi-spiritual faith people have in the retreat’s mud treatments speaks to a belief in healing. A young woman’s dreams of having children and starting a family is a belief in the future, even in the middle of violence and uncertainty. O’Rourke shows us that these dreams are not naïve but necessary, the ground on which a future might be built.

With Sanatorium, Ireland has chosen to put forward a meditation on what it means to live, endure, and insist on beauty where it might not be expected. It is a film that asks us to see Ukraine not only as a place under siege but as a place of humanity and humour, resilience and longing – and to believe in its future.

O’Rourke has said that he tries to allow for magic he does not expect. That openness suffuses the film, giving it a tenderness that is impossible to fake. It may have been born in a sanatorium, but its reach extends far beyond those walls.

• Directed by Gar O’Rourke. Cinematography by Denys Melnyk. 90 mins. In cinemas now. Watch the trailer below.