Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is just their third feature in a 50-year career, after Institute Benjamenta and The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes. Mostly, they make short animations. They also design for the stage, make music videos and devise site-specific installations such as their Overworlds and Underworlds project in Leeds for the Cultural Olympiad. Film features cost money, take for ever and involve a gaggle of interested parties, which is another word for meddlers. And so they very much doubt they’ll do another. “We’re 77 years old,” they tell me. “No one’s going to fund two old men.”

I’m delighted that they managed to slip this one under the wire. Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is unique and opaque, with its own spooky logic. Loosely inspired by the work of the Polish author Bruno Schulz, a perennial Quays touchstone, it’s about a young man, Jozef, who boards a steam train to visit his father at a TB hospital in the Carpathian mountains. So far, so straightforward – except that the film unfolds as seven disconnected scenarios which are reputedly the flashes retained by a detached retina. This detached retina, in turn, is stored inside a mechanical box and is due to be liquefied by the sun on the morning of 19 November. There are some thematic connections between these seven scenes, say the Quays. Naturally, though, they won’t be drawn on what they are.