Franz (Photo – Cohen Media Group)
In the end, the joke’s on us.
Franz
Directed by Agnieszka Holland – 2026
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Halfway through Franz, the new biopic by Agnieszka Holland about Franz Kafka, the writer is reading from the manuscript of The Trial while his cigar-smoking friends roar with laughter. They find the book’s premise unbelievable: that a man can be charged with a crime that he not only didn’t commit but isn’t even told about.
They laughed, but the history of the twentieth century, right up to the current ICE raids, tells us that Kafka wasn’t writing comedy but prophecy.
The scene suggests the movie’s significance and points to its limitation. For a conventional biopic, Kafka’s life was relatively short, he died of TB in 1924 at the age of 41, and lacking in outward events. We see Franz’s issues with women, including a broken engagement, and the film makes much of his relationship with his domineering father, who is shown clipping young Franz’s hair in an early scene—a, to me, overly obvious castration metaphor, considering Kafka’s troubled sexuality. None of these events, however, are anything like the more socially or historically significant “stuff” of a conventional biopic.
Holland attempts to solve this problem with tricks like having Kafka’s sister address the camera directly. There are also fast-forwards and jumps in time to nearly a century later, when we are guided through a Kafka museum by a boilerplate-reciting docent, or follow a group of Japanese tourists. The point, I suppose, is that Kafka’s legacy has been commercialized, but the whole exit-through-the-gift-shop machination of contemporary museums and galleries is well known by now. In another time jump, Kafka is standing in front of a wall spray-painted with graffiti, an image that feels gratuitous. I can’t imagine one tagger being inspired by or even aware of Kafka.
To her credit, Holland doesn’t insert any talking heads to tell us what Kafka’s significance was, but in her attempt to let the work speak for itself, she offers a brief visualization of his story “In the Penal Colony” that I found simply bloody, robbing the tale of the comic absurdity I remember finding in it when I read it years ago.
Kafka is played by German actor Idan Weiss, who certainly resembles the subject. Yet nothing for me can equal Kafka’s own straight-ahead portrait: a face whose expressionless surface almost dares you to guess what he’s thinking; it hints at both secrecy and genius.
I guess, ultimately, the problem with Franz is that it is about Kafka, but it is not Kafkaesque, and for that it falls short of Steven Soderbergh’s Kafka of 1991, or certainly Orson Welles’ black-and-white film version of The Trial, starring Anthony Perkins, from 1962.
The movie does give you a portrait of the man behind the work, but I suggest a drive or walk to your local bookstore or library when the final credits roll.
> Playing at Landmark Theatres Pasadena.
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