Franz

You don’t need to have read Kafka to know what “Kafkaesque” means — the idea that the world is a nightmare, a sick joke at your expense, continues to resonate a century after the writer died. Franz Kafka’s “uneasy dreams” have inspired filmmakers like Orson Welles, David Lynch, Michael Haneke, Terry Gilliam, and Roman Polanski, to name just a few, and now Agnieszka Holland has taken the bull by the horns and delivered a biopic that’s Kafkaesque and then some.

Holland blends scenes from Kafka’s life as a German Jew in Austro-Hungarian Prague with dramatizations his short stories and — at the film’s most surreal — documentary footage of Kafka’s present-day tourist economy (“Who will join me for a Kafka burger?”). Franz is densely layered but lively, and Holland hits the jackpot with newcomer Idan Weiss, whose tragicomic presence suggests a persecuted clown somewhere between Charlie Chaplin and Adrien Brody.

A refreshingly eccentric spin on the staid biopic.

Nick Schager, Daily Beast

Excellent… a ludic, kaleidoscopic montage film that flits like a fevered mind around the subject’s life and beyond, leaping decades with a single cut. Similarly to his writings, Franz the film is interested in a distilled, abstracted meditation on power, the law, control and desire that transcends the banal borders of realism.

Leslie Felperin, Hollywood Reporter

It’s ultimately a very strange movie, and a far cry from what anyone expects from even the most idiosyncratic biopics. But it’s hard not to wonder if Franz is ahead of its time, much like Kafka was.

3/4 Siddhant Adlakha, Observer