15/09/2025 - Agnieszka Holland directs a non-traditional biopic of Kafka and attempts to reckon with his legacy beyond buzzwords in this film led by a restless Idan Weiss

“The ratio of words written by Franz Kafka to those written about him is now one to ten million,” remarks a tour guide at the Prague museum dedicated to the famed German-language Czech author in Agnieszka Holland’s own unconventional tribute, Franz [+see also:
trailer
film profile]. Having just had its world premiere in the Toronto Special Presentations section, the non-chronological biopic – written by Marek Epstein, who also wrote Holland’s 2020 effort Charlatan [+see also:
film review
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interview: Agnieszka Holland
film profile] – will soon move to vie for the Golden Shell in the main competition of San Sebastián. The acclaimed Polish filmmaker notably uses form to dispel that very mythos and renarrativisation that has made Kafka Kafka, trading a stereotypical surrealism and darkness for an off-beat, at times even happy-go-lucky, feel.

The average non-Kafka reader would probably know The Metamorphosis (perhaps alongside that sketch of the cockroach upside down in bed by Rich Johnson, placed on many editions of the novel), but the man himself is undoubtedly a mystery. Luckily, we don't really need to know anything, nor do we need to know if this is really what he was like. Instead, Franz is expertly channelled via an anxiety-inducing performance by 28-year-old German actor Idan Weiss, who puts together twitches and unnerving bursts of laughter to create a captivating image of the man. Despite being admired by them all, he is certainly the awkward one amongst his sister Ottla (Katharina Stark), once-fiancée Felice (Carol Schuler) and his friend-cum-future-publisher Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz), all of whom at one point turn to the camera to narrate the story of the author. Holland here reminds us that this is Franz, as narrated by other people.

We are privy mostly to Franz’s adult life, as told through a series of memorable moments that give us a quick sense of who he is. He petulantly demands that an unhoused man give him change after handing him a coin, bursting into uncontrollable laughter upon seeing a piece of absurdity nobody else could, and grins at the grimaces released by the Prague elite during his live reading of a brutal scene from In the Penal Colony. The rest of the film is sewn together through a series of pseudo-experimental cinematographic choices with lensing by Tomasz Naumiuk, like characters around Franz breaking the fourth wall, a few tossed-in crash zooms and some visual collaging. Franz is never boring (and arguably also never “Kafkaesque”), but this hodgepodge of choices leaves viewers wondering about the reason behind this selection beyond simply an attempt at unsettling an image of the author.

Holland embeds a surprisingly large number of scenes that try to reckon with his legacy – or, rather, with what has been commercialised of it – turning to the present day to show bits and pieces of the Kafka Museum, tourist trinkets and guides that offer a glimpse into his life. Doing so, she repeatedly points to the fact that as much as we try to reach the truth of the man himself, all we can do is make frantic attempts to piece it together at best, or leave it to be financially capitalised on at worst. Franz emerges as an entertaining attempt to fracture this monolithic frame of reference of the Czech author, but it never ends up being as subversive as it seeks to be.

Franz is a Czech-German-Polish production staged by Marlene Film Production, X Filme Creative Pool and Metro Films. Films Boutique holds the rights to its world sales.