Kafka

Prague, 1919. Kafka works in an insurance office by day and writes at night. A friend is found dead and the official account says suicide. He does not believe it. He begins to look into it and finds himself inside an underground organisation and among experiments being carried out in the castle above the city. People are disappearing and nobody asks. Steven Soderbergh directs. Jeremy Irons plays Kafka, with Theresa Russell, Ian Holm, Jeroen Krabbé and Alec Guinness in the cast. The film is not a biography. Kafka's life and his writing are mixed together; the man lives inside his own novels and the events come from The Trial and The Castle. The image is black and white, and the section inside the castle is shot in colour; that transition is its best known decision. Soderbergh had won the main prize at Cannes with his first film and this is his second; it goes in an entirely different direction and did not do well. Real locations in Prague were used and the city is built as a labyrinth. Years later the director recut the film into a different version, saying he had not been satisfied with the original. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and know Kafka's writing. Who it is not for: the narrative is scattered, the tone is uneven, and it settles fully as neither biography nor thriller.