Franz (2025)
Agnieszka Holland’s biographical drama about Franz Kafka is, in my opinion, one of the more genuinely interesting biopics to emerge in recent years. And I say that as someone who has sat through enough of the genre to recognise its familiar machinery: the dutiful childhood scene, the meaningful glance at the object destined for symbolism, the swelling score timed precisely to the moment of creative breakthrough. Franz refuses most of these temptations, and the film is considerably better for the refusal.
Idan Weiss plays Kafka with a kind of interior restlessness that the camera seems to understand instinctively. This is not the gloomy, black-clad figure of literary mythology; the man who apparently never smiled and spent his evenings inventing bureaucratic nightmares. Weiss gives us something more persuasive: a person who laughs with his sisters, who is undone by sensory overload, who notices things nobody else in the room seems to register: the drip of a tap, the temperature of silence. Whether or not this squares precisely with historical record, it feels like a living human being rather than a monument.
The story traces Kafka’s life from his youth in late 19th-century Prague to his death at forty in 1924. Caught between a domineering father, an insurance office that had no idea what it was housing, and the literary pressure building somewhere beneath both, Kafka drifts through his own life like a man perpetually standing in the wrong queue. Holland and screenwriter Marek Epstein structure the film as a mosaic rather than a march, blending period drama, surreal digression, and occasional flash-forwards to the present-day Kafka Museum. The ambition is real; the question is whether the film fully earns it.
Tomasz Naumiuk’s cinematography gives early 20th-century Prague a cool, exacting beauty; the kind of visual precision that suits a story about a man who processed the disorder of existence through immaculate prose. The production design is similarly accomplished. Holland has always been a filmmaker drawn to individuals caught inside historical forces larger than themselves. Mr. Jones, In Darkness, and Green Border all circle that same preoccupation. And her sympathy for Kafka shows in every compositional choice, though sympathy alone does not substitute for interrogation.
Where Franz stumbles, in my view, is in the gaps it leaves unfilled. Kafka’s Jewish identity, which is significant, surely, for a man living in Central Europe during the years leading toward catastrophe, receives only passing attention. His broken engagements, his complicated relationship with illness and his own body, the particular texture of his loneliness: these are gestured at but rarely pressed. The mosaic structure is meant to suggest the impossibility of fully knowing another person, which is a defensible artistic position, but a film can acknowledge that impossibility and still press harder on what it does choose to show. More than once I found myself wanting Franz to slow down and stay somewhere a little longer.
The cockroaches, when they appear, are wisely left alone. No lingering close-up, no portentous musical cue, just a brief acknowledgement and the scene moves on, trusting the audience to make the connection without being nudged.
Kafka asked Max Brod to burn everything. Brod refused, and literary history pivoted on that single act of defiant friendship. Holland’s film is not quite the definitive portrait of the man; it is too fond of impressionism and too wary of the harder biographical questions for that. But it is genuinely felt, formally daring, and, for all its frustrations, more alive than most films that share its genre. For my money, that earns it the two hours running time.