Franz (2025)

Franz is a restless, jagged attempt to film Kafka from the inside out, and it only half succeeds.

Agnieszka Holland rejects the safe, linear biopic for a collage of timelines, direct-to-camera addresses, and crash zooms that oscillate between inspired and self-indulgent. Idan Weiss gives a sharply nervy Kafka, twitching between embarrassment, curiosity, and dread, and the film shines whenever it simply watches him navigate family, lovers, and the suffocating bureaucracy he'd later weaponize on the page.

Franz is a restless, jagged attempt to film Kafka from the inside out, and it only half succeeds. Agnieszka Holland rejects the safe, linear biopic for a collage of timelines, direct‑to‑camera addresses, and crash zooms that oscillate between inspired and self‑indulgent. Idan Weiss gives a sharply nervy Kafka, twitching between embarrassment, curiosity, and dread, and the film shines whenever it simply watches him navigate family, lovers, and the suffocating bureaucracy he'd later weaponize on the page.

The problem is volume: so many stylistic ideas compete that the whole thing starts to feel like a museum installation about Kafka rather than a lived experience of the man. Some viewers will find this "punk Gen Z Kafka" energy exhilarating; others will see only visual noise and strained profundity.

Franz isn't the definitive Kafka film, but it is a provocative one: messy, uneven, occasionally brilliant, and more interested in how we consume Kafka today than in telling us who he "really" was.