FRANZ
(director/writer: Agnieszka Holland; screenwriter: Marek Epstein; cinematographer: Tomasz Naumiuk; editor: Pavel Hrdlička; music: Mary Komasa, Antoni Komasa Łazarkiewicz; cast: Idan Weiss (Franz Kafka), Peter Kurth (Hermann Kafka), Jenovéfa Boková (Milena Jesenska, Franz’s translator), Ivan Trojan (Siegfried Lowy), Sandra Korzeniak (Julie Kafka, Franz’s mother), Katharina Stark (Ottla, Franz’s sister), Carol Schuler (Felice Bauer, Franz’s fiancee), Sebastian Schwarz (Max Brod, Franz’s publisher ), Gesa Schermuly (Greta Bloch); Runtime: 128; MPAA Rating: NR; producers: Šárka Cimbalová, Agnieszka Holland; Metro Films; 2025-Czech Republic/Germany/Poland-in German, Czech, Yiddish, French, English, Japanese)
“The uneven but ambitious biopic is effective enough capturing the brilliant writer’s struggles over the creative process.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The celebrated Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland (“Spoor”/”Green Border”) and co-writer
Marek Epstein dig into the humble civil servant Czech writer Franz Kafka (Idan Weiss) and his life of alienation in the early 1900s in Prague. He died in 1924 from tuberculosis at age 40. It tells of his tough sledding with his Jewish family over his differing views on religion, his fantasies as a teen with girls, and his struggles to become a writer while working as a bureaucrat at a civil service job.
The nonlinear film follows the enigmatic Franz over different periods of life as he finds his surreal voice, as it moves from Prague to Berlin, and over various fictions and actual references to his writings.
The uneven but ambitious biopic is effective enough capturing the brilliant writer’s struggles over the creative process, but considering that its subject is such a powerful force in the world of literature, the film fails to be completely satisfying as it keeps moving around too much to get a clear picture of such an amazing intellectual personality.
The film was not as emotionally moving as I thought it should be. But it’s well-researched and well-acted by Idan Weiss as the author and by Peter Kurth as Franz’s tyrannical father.
Holland only tells us what we already know about Kafka and adds nothing radically new for us to ponder.
It played at the Toronto Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 8/27/2026 GRADE: B-
dennisschwartzreviews.com