I’m not sure if it’s just that I hit the day five morning crash of MIFF but I struggled to keep my eyes open in this Irish-made, quietly languid documentary about a Ukrainian health sanatorium that seems stuck in the 80s.

It has all the elements you expect of a quirky look at the vestiges of Soviet-era culture. The Kuyalnik Sanitorium is one of several imposing 1000-room hotel blocks around a sea renowned for its black mud near Odessa. Where once there were 300 people checking in each day, now there are only a handful. 

It’s based on health and recuperation, which includes a range of unspecified and odd machines that must’ve been made 50 years ago. There are mud baths, high-pressure showers, and electrodes strapped to various parts of the body.

We meet some of the guests – a mother with her 40-year-old son who can’t seem to let go of her expectations and responsibility to make his life worthwhile. There is an ex soldier dealing with the physical repercussions of his wounds. There is more than one older woman, having lost a husband late in life who is struggling to cope. There are plenty of white headed older man joking about women.

We also see the workers, from maintenance man trying to patch up the ageing building to the manager and medical expert trying to keep the business going.

We get little glimpses of the current situation with the Ukraine, mainly air raid sirens and smoke on the horizon. We feel like we are at arms length though, just like those working and staying at the sanatorium, not sure what impact the war is actually having or will have. They talk about the effects of the missile shelling keeping people away and that hopefully it won’t continue into the next year, but of course we know that in 2023 there is still much ahead of them.

The fact that I kept having micro naps was as much to do with the slow quietness of the documentary as it was with the lack of drama or driving narrative. I’m unsure whether it being made by Gar O’Rourke, an Irish director, had an impact on this as there is definitely a sense of looking at an exhibit through glass with wry amusement.