The Kuyalnik sanatorium has been through the wars. Established in 1833 near Odesa, the institution became one of Russia’s most renowned health resorts, famed for its therapeutic mud and mineral waters.
After sustaining serious damage during the second World War, it reopened in 1947 as the Soviet Union’s holiday destination of choice, replete with its own brand of mineral water.
Today its mostly Russian-speaking clientele leave behind Russian literature, which is shelved and hidden because of Ukraine’s prohibition on the material.
In his impressive feature-length debut, the Irish documentarian Gar O’Rourke offers an immersive and mesmerising portrait of life in a still recognisably Soviet institution. Those masseurs aren’t messing around, and the architecture is definitely brutalist.
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The contemporary conflict wisely remains off-screen as visitors to the wellness retreat seek treatments for everything from fertility issues to psoriasis. One guest arrives with her bachelor thirtysomething son, in the hope of finding him a wife.
Cures include old-fashioned black-mud baths, electrotherapies and hydrotreatments, marshalled into soothing institutional rhythms, in a welcome overlap with the great American film-maker Fred Wiseman’s studies of patients.
Staff interview guests about ailments and fret over such procedural issues as who will fix the lift. A recommended fertility doctor is characterised as miraculous. The general manager laments the dwindling number of guests.
The cinematographer Denys Melnyk picks out striking tableaux of sea views and brutalist architecture. It’s easy to imagine the Kuyalnik sanatorium as sharing a postcode with Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel. But unlike that fantasia, the guiding principle of Ireland’s official submission for the best international feature film category of the 2026 Academy Awards is human connection.
In cinemas from Friday, September 5th
