User Reviews

It's not easy to transpose Kafka to the screen. And he was, unexpectedly, a damned hard read in German class too. I dare anyone to make a movie about a man being refused entrance through a gate that was built solely for him to enter. What I mean is, much of what goes on depends on trivial, humdrum matters that are slightly cockeyed. Okay, a man turns into a giant dung beetle. What do I do now, Ma? In this very good adaptation of "The Trial" -- better than Orson Welles' and Anthony Perkins' -- that note of things being off kilter is effectively captured.

The production has an oneiristic quality in which we are Kyle MacLachlen, the only person who plays it straight, indignant at being arrested by a couple of clowns who won't identify themselves or tell him what the charge against him is. But instead of taking MacLachlan to "the Depot", they let him spend the day working at his job in the bank, then return to his apartment at night.

He asks his landlady, Juliet Stevenson in a peerless performance, to be his "advisor" since he needs someone to help him face whatever trouble he's supposed to be in. She smiles coyly, looks away from him, and acts thoroughly distracted -- exactly as figures do in a dream when you're trying to get their attention. It's not that easy to paint everyday interaction that preposterous without going overboard. Luis Bunuel managed it in one dream sequence in "Los Olvidados" when a mother turns to her child with a great big grin and offers him a slab of raw, dripping meat. And a production team seemed to fall into it almost by accident in the cheap horror movie, "Carnival of Souls."

Portentous things happen. Strangers want to take you away for no reason. People in other rooms are listening to you. The air reeks with paranoia. The very air you breathe is ominous. If Kafka were alive today, he could write the same novel, slipping only the clothes and furnishings out of Prague in the 1920s.

Nobody can claim the movie sticks closely to Kafka's novel. It's all chopped up into inchoate bits and pieces, like MacLachlan at the finish. Beautiful, buxom women keep throwing themselves at MacLachlan's feet and begging him, "Kiss me. Make love to me." This happens to me all the time but I don't recall its happening to Joseph K.

A bit of gratuitous nudity might have helped because in its second act the movie runs headlong into a problem often encountered by absurd stories. If anything can happen, how can you build a dramatic structure out of it? What carries the viewer along? Certainly it's not Joseph K's character. He's no wimp, so it's hard to feel he's being humiliated. He's defiant, demanding, and insulting, not an inconvenient dung beetle. The movie begins with his arrest and ends with his pointless execution. I can't remember his ever asking what he's being charged with. He talks to several people along the way but they respond with gibberish.

That doesn't detract from the performances, which are just fine on everyone's part. Two cameos stand out. Jason Robards is a frail but sprightly lawyer. Anthony Hopkins appears in one scene as the prison chaplain who relates the parable of the man waiting forever before the gate of "the law." Hopkins is simply magnetic. Nobody else could have told that simple, paradoxical tale so grippingly.

This is by far the most wired,bizarre and strange movie I have ever seen, during the movie I convinced that it was some sort of dream sequence and the protagonist will wake up at some point and unlike the most of the viewers I haven't read the novel it is based on,so to me whole movie seemed illogical,like a dream where some bits and pieces make some sense but otherwise its just jumbled and random, I even thought that it might turn out to be a psychological thriller and towards the end I'll see the main character sitting in a mental asylum,the film would've made much more sense then,at least to me, I watched the movie because of Anthony Hopkins as I am a big fan of his but I was sad to see him only towards the end of the movie and that too only for 5-6 minutes,to me this whole movie seemed metaphorical,as if its meant to show the confusion one goes through after getting entangled with legal matters or the corruption which runs rampant in the bureaucracy,anyways before watching the movie I thought that Anthony Hopkins must have been playing the role of an Advocate who is defending a man who has been charged with a crime but he have not been told what his crime is and,boy was i wrong.

Like multiple critic reviews of this film, I had a very hard time feeling anything for Joseph K. Mostly, in my opinion, because I felt like even he was in on parts of the plot that I wasn't privy to. The story was always bouncing from one character to the next and the dialogue was so abstract that I had a very hard time even understanding what was going on up even to the ending.

One thing that i was struck by, was the atmosphere. The film was surreal without being too over-the-top. I felt like I was watching a horrible dream unfold where no one was sure whether or not what was happening was actually real.

Bottom line, I'd recommend this film to people who aren't into the Hollywood blockbusters, but rather like watching a film for the underlying themes. There is simply so little in this film that holds your attention (besides random sensual scenes), that most people including myself really won't find the film worth watching.

One last thing, don't get too excited about Anthony Hopkins in this film. He has a great performance for about 10 minutes near the end of the movie and that's it.

Pinter's Kafka; 'The Trial'. Brilliant film, I think. Lovely, knowing Prague, to see it as the backdrop. Why bother with derivative stuff like 'Waiting for Godot', a pathetic attempt to infuse the tragedy with facile humour. Hopkins is perfectly cast, as is the castle at Prague. Kafka sees the world, the world of power and corruption so clearly, but fails to see the redemption Epicurus and Ecclesiastes did.

Perfect atmosphere, cinematography and acting. The film is a delight.

To short to be properly Kafkaesque, but who would watch it if it were long enough? It avoids the problems of too literary a take that the film of Finnegan's Wake makes.

We want to shout, almost all the way through, not; 'Look behind you!', but 'What's the Charge?'

This is not a film for the young. It lacks the obvious ennui that a teenager would seek, and find, from the book. It, rather, I think, shows an adult understanding of our helplessness.

We can love the void, or hate it, but we can't deny that it is there. If we can, unlike the Kafka's anti-hero, refuse to take it all at face value, or, more importantly, at the apparently deep, skull-level value the bureaucrats would wish us to believe are real, then we can live.

I see Kafka as, despite himself, deeply life-affirming. The Castle, Trail, or Plague we see is only an illusion. As the gatekeeper says, the door is open and is only there, specially, for us, or for us to ignore.

I'm delighted to have ignored the doors, the gatekeepers and the controllers that would have had me imprisoned in my own mind. It's good and healthy to see them here for what substantial obstacles the can be if you don't ignore them.

A man awakens to be told that he has been arrested, however he is not told why he has been arrested and he is aloud to do everyday things like go to the bank even though he is due to stand in court. He must find out why he stood trial and how he can escape his sentence.

This film starred: Kyle Maclachlan, Anthony Hopkins & Alfred Molina.

The Trial is a boring, slow and very dull movie, I was intrigued by this movie because of it's tagline and the fact that Anthony Hopkins was in it. You can understand my disappointment when I found out that he was only in the film for 10 minutes. However I found out that Trigger from Only Fools and Horses was in, however he was only in it for a couple of minutes. Not recommended, very slow paced and very boring.

*/***** Very poor.