'Franz' Review: Agnieszka Holland's Kafka Biopic Is an Old-School Disaster

"If nothing else, "Franz" gets the handwriting right. Sure, praising someone's calligraphy is the quintessential backhanded compliment, but when it comes to Kafka, the penmanship is important. The Czech literary titan was famous for preferring to write longhand, even after the explosion of the typewriter. His manuscripts are displayed in museums across the world, having attained an almost mythical status. Agnieszka Holland's feverish new biopic on Kafka often finds itself pouring over his desk or sneaking glimpses of his love letters."

"But these pages are nothing more than solid replicas. They are superficial offerings to a shallow hagiography, an unfortunately apt microcosm of the rest of the film. "Franz" is a total misfire - outrageous and bland in equal measure. Nearly every garish flight of fancy that decorates the frame is a distraction while the majority of the film does little more than rotely dramatize Kafka's biography."

"That last point is no exaggeration. Holland and Marek Epstein's screenplay breathlessly regurgitates an aggregated fact sheet of Kafka's life. It feels as if there isn't a single event, desire or character trait demonstrated by any individual within the film that does not appear on Kafka's Wikipedia page. We follow Kafka from his early readings through his torrid, long-distance affairs with countless women, until his eventual death from tuberculosis."

Agnieszka Holland's Franz emphasizes Kafka's handwriting and manuscripts, lingering over desks and love letters and staging surreal tableaux of pages trampled at his Prague museum. The film often favors visual flourishes—garish flights of fancy and feverish tableaux—over psychological or interpretive depth. The screenplay by Holland and Marek Epstein compresses Kafka's life into a rote chronology that mirrors a fact sheet, tracing readings, long-distance affairs, flashbacks, and his death from tuberculosis. Occasional time-displacements and modern-day intrusions fail to alleviate slow pacing. The result is a biopic heavy on surface mimicry and light on meaningful insight.

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