Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | September 7, 2025
Franz Kafka did not want to be remembered. The Czech writer of works so distinct that we turned his name into a descriptor for a whole subgenre of literature finished none of his full-length novels and burned around 90% of his writings. He received little critical fanfare during his lifetime and less attention for his death at the age of 40. We only know of his genius now because his friend and literary executor Max Brod defied Kafka’s desire for all of his work to be destroyed after his passing. One would imagine that he’d find the idea of someone making a film about him to be both needless and embarrassing. For Polish director Agnieszka Holland, it posed an intriguing narrative challenge.
Franz is not especially Kafkaesque. Don’t expect scenes of terrifying bureaucracy or the labyrinthine panic of totalitarian double-speak here. There’s no moment where young Franz (Idan Weiss) sees a bug and we flash forward to him writing Metamorphosis (although we do get a couple cameos from cockroaches.) To the credit of Holland and screenwriter Marek Epstein, this is a film more intrigued by its subject’s view of the world than a retelling of his life. Holland has said in interviews that she didn’t want to show Kafka as the gloomy lawyer forever clad in black that history turned him into. So, we see him often laughing and joking with his beloved sisters, and seeking comfort in silence. He has moments of sensory overload that he seeks escape from, and is often distracted by things that nobody else seems bothered by, like the rhythmic drip of water from the office ceiling into a porcelain bowl.
Franz loves his sisters but has a difficult relationship with his father, a boorish businessman who chews on meat like Henry VIII and is never satisfied with his only son’s ways. While he does not want to shoulder the burden of taking over the floundering family business, he will acquiesce to his father’s demands now and then, at the cost of his own potential creative development. He is a good lawyer but feels conflicted about how much he’d rather be writing than working.
At one point, he becomes engaged but seems more enamoured by the idea of love through letters than the hard work of marriage, a subplot that shows how callous he can be in his division of real life and his own mind. Friends and family interject with to-camera chats about the Franz they knew, like they’re the talking heads in a documentary of his life. Franz does a live reading of one of his most infamous stories, “In the Penal Colony”, which we see come to life in a surprisingly bloody scene, interjected with Prague polite society gagging and scolding him in response.
One can’t fault Holland for ambition. This non-linear biopic bounces across Kafka’s life but also his afterlife. There are a number of scenes in present-day Prague, home to the Franz Kafka Museum and an entire industry of Kafka tourism. Franz’s anxiety as he writes in his office takes form as a series of eyes from modern museum visitors peering into the exhibit of where he wrote most of his work. One Japanese guide sells disposable towels to those who wish to lie on the gated spot by the lakeside where Kafka sunbathed. Kafka burgers are for sale, even though he was famously vegetarian. It’s an unexpectedly canny way for the film to reckon with the commercialism that engulfed the work of a man who never wanted anyone to read him.
It doesn’t all hang together. Some moments feel didactic, with characters talking like they’re straight out of a Kafka story in ways that do not gel with the rest of the action. In one scene, Franz gets into an argument with a homeless person who asked for one crown and wouldn’t provide change when Franz gave him two. “We are all responsible for what we say,” he bellows to this starving man on the street. “All words have a unique, unmistakable weight!” Maybe it works better on the page than in a story where Franz Kafka is a vocabulary pedant.
Holland doesn’t want to paint Kafka with broad strokes, the kind that biopics are typically reliant on. Franz is never boring to watch but it’s also oddly too much and not enough. There are fleeting mentions of key Kafka information that fans will catch but one feels they could have been given more room to breathe overall. For example, the film has surprisingly little to say about Kafka’s Judaism, a crucial part of his life and influences, especially given his status as a man in Germany in the lead-up to the rise of Nazism. It seems that, in her eagerness to avoid the trite tropes of the biopic genre, Holland has created a painting of Kafka that is lacking in key connective tissue. She aims for Kafkaesque but that’s not a philosophy that gels with something as conventional as a life story. The spirit is there but the heft is lacking.
Franz had its world premiere at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. It currently does not have a wide release date.
