Agnieszka Holland’s “Franz” is less a conventional biopic and more a kaleidoscope of anxiety, contradiction, and artistic self-sabotage.
It is a cinematic experience so unconventional, so fragmented, and so deliberately jarring that it risks alienating the viewer, yet in doing so, it achieves something few biographical films manage: it truly feels “Kafkaesque.”
Holland and screenwriter Marek Epstein reject the traditional cradle-to-grave narrative, opting instead for an experimental, non-linear mosaic. The film operates in a strange, singular space where Franz Kafka’s inner world, his professional life of the 1900s, and the commercialized reality of his afterlife collide. The action jumps restlessly from childhood trauma and bureaucratic drudgery to complicated romances, all set against an often anachronistic backdrop featuring abrupt crash zooms, jarring editing, and Polish indie rock needle drops.
The brilliance of “Franz” lies in its structural critique of the biopic form itself. The film confronts Kafka’s reluctant afterlife head-on. The author wished for his diaries and writings to be burned after his death, only for his friend, Max Brod, to ensure his legacy survived—a decision that led to more being written about Kafka than he ever penned.
Holland highlights this profound betrayal of privacy through constant fourth-wall breaks, where characters like Brod, Kafka’s father, and his fiancées speak directly to the camera, offering contradictory, fragmented testimonies. The real Franz remains elusive, known only through these unreliable shards of perspective.
This theme culminates in the film’s most effective, if unsettling, technique: the flash-forward to the present day. We are repeatedly shown modern tourists peering into Kafka’s reconstructed room at the Franz Kafka Museum, a heartbreaking visual metaphor for the consumption of a private life. The satirical inclusion of the fictional “Kafka Burgers,” a joke where Americans are funneled into a tourist trap based on a man who was a devoted vegetarian, is a devastatingly absurd comment on how the profound and complex has been reduced to a consumable commodity.
The film beautifully visualizes the themes that fueled Kafka’s genius. His life was a constant clash between the mundane and the monstrous. We constantly see Kafka hemmed in by the cacophony of his family’s noise and the soul-crushing bureaucracy of his insurance job, demonstrating how the routine world was constantly crushing the creative spirit.
Two key scenes perfectly capture the source and result of this tension:
- The Father’s Brutality: A powerful flashback shows his overbearing merchant father attempting to teach a young Franz to swim by throwing him into a lake, coldly declaring, “A little bit of fear will be a good lesson for him.” This succinct moment captures the genesis of the anxiety, guilt, and crippling self-doubt that permeated his later work.
- “In the Penal Colony” Reading: This is perhaps the film’s most visceral sequence. As Kafka reads his gruesome story about an elaborate execution machine to a polite, bourgeois society audience, Holland intercuts the reading with a graphic, cinematic re-creation of the horrific machine carving text into flesh. The contrast between the audience’s horrified, gagging reaction and the stark, unflinching on-screen violence perfectly demonstrates the revolutionary, boundary-pushing power of his imagination.
While the film often risks being as challenging as its subject, it struggles to justify some of its more bizarre artistic detours. Moments like a cherry dangling above a fallen Franz’s lips as he peeps up a girl’s skirts, or the constant crash zooms, feel less profound and more “catastrophically silly,” as if trying too hard to signal “This is art!”
Most notably, the extended sequence featuring a naked, animal-masked tug-of-war at a sanitarium, while symbolically aiming to address the burden of the body and the search for release, feels gratuitous. The extensive use of nudity in this scene adds no additional intellectual purpose that could not have been achieved visually without it. Even the scene where Franz and his father are in the changing room, and we see the camera forcing too much onto the father’s clothless body. This forced inclusion of genitalia and explicitly serves only to unnecessarily limit the film’s potential exposure and wider audience reach, a misjudged choice in an otherwise artistically focused endeavor.
The cast of “Franz” deserves immense praise for grounding the film’s experimental chaos in profound human emotion. Idan Weiss is captivating as the eponymous author, navigating Kafka’s crippling inner turmoil with a magnetic blend of awkwardness, suppressed desire, and fleeting humor. However, the film’s standout performance belongs to Carol Schuler as Felice Bauer. As Kafka’s long-suffering fiancée, Schuler captures the agonizing complexity of loving a genius who is emotionally absent and profoundly conflicted. There is one particularly exquisite scene where, upon reading one of Franz’s painfully detached letters, a single tear rolls down her cheek, unleashing an internal torrent of emotions—recognition, disappointment, enduring hope, and crushing despair. It is a moment of pure, raw brilliance that is truly recognition-worthy and provides the necessary human anchor for Holland’s ambitious project.
Despite its occasionally redundant visual choices, “Franz” is a triumph of inventive filmmaking. It succeeds precisely because it refuses to deliver the comfortable, definitive portrait that audiences feel entitled to. It is a film that risks—and often achieves—the same polarizing, unsettling genius as the man himself.
Verdict: A bold, inventive, and deeply felt exploration of a genius’s internal torment.
