Much like David Cronenberg's 'Naked Lunch', 'Kafka' attempts to merge a biographical film and a literary adaptation, by combining elements from Franz Kafka's notoriously unfilmable books and stories with details from his real life. The thing is, where Steven Soderbergh's film is an admirable effort at filming Kafka's work, other films by more accomplished directors, made around the same time or several years earlier, managed to capture Kafka's spirit much more successfully without ever mentioning his name or the title of any of his works - Scorsese's 'After Hours', Woody Allen's 'Shadows and Fog', and to a lesser extent Terry Gilliam's 'Brazil' and Joel & Ethan Coen's 'Barton Fink' all achieve Kafka's unique feeling of futility and paranoia, as well as his pitch black sense of humor, while 'Kafka' resembles Kafka's writing mainly on the surface. This is the script's fault more than Soderbergh's, because the film looks great and delivers the dark, weird disconcerting feeling of Kafka's works, but by not delving into the philosophy behind them, by having almost no sense of humor, and by adhering to a pretty straightforward conspiracy plot, it remains little more than an aesthetic illustration of what a Kafka film might look like.

Despite a weak script, the film manages several memorable scenes, mainly thanks to terrific cinematography and a wonderful cast - Jeremy Irons, surprisingly, not being one of the film's standout performance. Rather, it's more minor characters played by Joel Grey, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Keith Allen, Simon McBurney and the great Alec Guinness in his last feature film role that stick to the viewer's mind, and for brief moments they can create the sense of paranoia, of surreal, nightmarish bureaucracy that is at the root of Kafka's writing; again, without the underlying philosophy, there's something unsatisfying about the overall result, and the story keeps distracting from the more interesting aspects. The film is, overall, interesting but frustrating; it's probably worth watching for Kafka fans, but it's not good enough to truly appease them. On the other hand, it may be too confusing for anyone who isn't familiar enough with his work.

Kafka, a clerk at a Prague insurance firm, is upset when a friend mysteriously vanishes. Investigating the disappearance, he uncovers a group of terrorists trying to expose a secret police state where all non-conformists are kidnapped and murdered.

This is a terrific mosaic of a picture; part biopic (Franz Kafka was a clerk, did not get on with his father, asked a friend to destroy his manuscripts and died of tuberculosis), part adaptation of Kafka's fiction (notably The Castle and The Trial), part homage to German expressionist cinema (Holm's character is called Murnau), and an enjoyably scary Gothic thriller with a great mad cast. Irons is a perfectly repressed hero, Russell is as gorgeous and intimidating as ever, Krabbe steals his scenes as a canny gravedigger, Mueller-Stahl is a copper from forties film-noir complete with razor-blade voice, Glover is an iconic villain and Allen and McBurney have a whale of a time as two pratfalling assistants. The script is a bit disposable, but it captures the essence of Kafka's nightmarish scribblings perfectly - hideous bureaucracy, impotent heroes, monstrous cabals, devious conspiracies and an overwhelming sense that truth and beauty are beyond our grasp. Shot in Prague in glorious black-and-white on fantastic period locations and stunning sets by production designer Gavin Bocquet. This is a great filmmaker's film - it's impossible to imagine it existing in any other form of expression, and it manages to be richly artistic but at the same time extremely enjoyable and completely lacking in pretension. Soderbergh is a bit of an enigma to me - this is a great movie, as is his subsequent film, King Of The Hill, but both bombed financially, whereas many of his later more commercial and critically-lauded movies are much less interesting. Check out Kafka though - it's got style, scares and terrific performances, and it's about the greatest paranoid fantastist that ever lived.

This film is a tribute to Franz Kafka, with a plot inspired from his writings. Without reading at least one book by Kafka, the film is totally incomprehensible. A writer that lived at the end of the 18th century and the start of the 19th, he wrote about the depressing world of oppressing capitalism, the same mass oriented philosophy that inspired fascism and communism alike. His books were never happy and their ending was often depressing.

So why should this film be any different? The plot is kind of shifty, but the acting, cinematography, location and music are great. After seeing this film, I can't imagine anybody else but Jeremy Irons in the lead role.

Bottom line: it's about the feeling. The same dark feeling that Kafka expressed through his books is expressed by this movie. The story (a mix of Kafka subjects) is just a pretext. Be warned, though, that it is not an easy movie. It is a noir and heavy film.