Franz

The film works as a mosaic. Rather than tracing Kafka from birth to death, Holland assembles his life in non-chronological fragments, letting scenes of the writer at his desk, among the women he cannot commit to, and inside his own fictions sit side by side. Idan Weiss plays the adult Kafka, and Holland shot the production in Czech and German, the languages of Kafka's Prague.

Reviews from the autumn festival premieres split sharply. Writing in Slant, Eli Friedberg judged the psychology schematic, faulting a structure that returns again and again to the same paternal wound. The Hollywood Reporter took the warmer view, reading the non-chronological design as a prism held up to a writer who resists any tidy account of himself.

For the clinician the material is familiar and pointed. Peter Kurth's Hermann is no monster but a gregarious, emotionally limited father who voices love and worry through belittling. Around that relationship the film gathers guilt, submission to authority, the failing tubercular body, and writing pursued as a way of standing before an inner tribunal that never adjourns.