Where to start? Leave it to me, when choosing a film from the great director, to choose one that probably least best represents him. Well, I sure wasn’t going to write any more additional, undeserved praise about that over-rated movie about a sled, so this is what you get!. Just kidding. Seriously though, The Trial is an adaptation of a Franz Kafka story so the challenging and somewhat inaccessible nature of his work will always take the driver’s seat in a project like this. Similarly, another favorite director of mine, Michael Haneke, made his attempt at adapting the Kafka book The Castle. Though both directors have distinct and recognizable styles, both of these films would be lost among their distinguished…

Absurd. Surreal. Oppressive. All fine words to describe Orson Welles' The Trial, but I think the term that best describes how I felt while watching is 'hysterical': not in the sense that The Trial is a comedy - to describe it as a black comedy stretches the very definition to the breaking point - but that I found myself laughing to ward off the physical and mental unease it forced upon me (especially during the absolutely insane last 20 minutes). That a film can cause laughter as a defense mechanism is a testament to Welles, Kafka, and Perkins.

The dialogue flies by so fast that you become inured to the fact that the words spoken are so bizarre, the sentences…

Byzantine legal procedure, bureaucratic absurdity, and an inhumane modern world; such are the concerns of Kafka's novel and Welle's adaptation. Kafka's source material is undoubtedly my favourite piece of literature, and I approached this with a reasonable amount of caution, especially given it's (and the author's work in general) distinctly surreal and potentially unfilmable style of prose.

This is the prose in which time, and the passing thereof are irrelevant, and people seem to float endlessly and they're constantly diverted from their goal, nothing in which they're diverted to making much sense to them- very much like a nightmare. Which i must add is actually how Welles himself describes the novel in the prologue over an admittedly clunky and unnecessary…

The Trial is a gripping film of how bureaucratic systems can crush the individual. It is the story of one man within the societal machine. His trial takes place outside work hours, to ensure he can slave away at work and be crushed by the system in his free time also. This is a surreal and cryptic film, with conversations that all go nowhere and fruitless attempts by our protagonist to escape his fate. The odd cinematography and large sets create something perfectly confusing. However, even beyond Kafka's nonsensical narrative, this film is a indecipherable mess. As our lead is illogically led down a path towards death, the film makes little effort to present this confusion clearly. What is deliberately…

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I didn't read the unfinished Kafka novel Der Prozess but I read some of Kafka's other (short) stories, the best known would be Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis) so I knew (and liked) the kind of atmosphere he transports via his writing style. Luckily, I didn't know anything about The Trial other than it being a film directed by Orson Welles and starring Anthony Perkins. It was recommended to me several times here on Letterboxd (shout-out to Michael's Cinema Paradiso especially) and oh my, this a great film.

Welles perfectly captures Kafka's depressively confusing atmosphere by a fantastic cinematography, a phenomenal script and (probably his…

Perhaps one of the least known of Orson Welles' near immaculate filmography is The Trial, a Franz Kafka adaptation that only could have come from an imagination as bizarre and inventive as Welles'. Starring a post-Psycho yet still fractured Anthony Perkins, it's a tricky maze of bureaucracy that satirizes a melancholy examination of the absolutely laborious process (hence the original title Le Procès). This is entirely a Welles picture, however- his trademark angled camera shots are omnipresent, furthering the delusional funhouse mirror style proceedings that ensue for the strangely named Josef K.

The Trial's style is something out of a fever dream- or more aptly perhaps, nightmare- that whisks our befuddled protagonist through his legal proceedings for a crime that…

uhh oh my god??? my new favorite welles???? absolutely??? fuck????

i am FLOORED! i wish that orson had made more surreal films—his execution of dream logic through fluidity of location and changeable world rules is so flawless. i spent this whole movie internally screaming. and this is the perfect role for anthony perkins! he brings levity and incredulity that balances the bureaucratic stiffness of those around him. i know this wasn't filmed in prague because of the soviet government, but the locations used still feel distinctly central european in their mixture of cold, hard-edged communist architecture and baroque buildings that could fit seamlessly into old town prague where kafka lived. this juxtaposition between chaos and order plays a large part…

It's been said that the logic of this story is the logic of a dream. A nightmare.

Cannot tell you how badly I've wanted to see this movie since I was made aware of its existence. Orson Welles is a filmmaker who I've come to really respect recently, and I'm always on the lookout for more work from Anthony Perkins. So, match made in heaven. Admittedly, The Trial suffers from pacing issues, and it did also lose its way to me in its final quarter, but by the time the film had reached that, it had still made its point well. This is a a feature of paranoia, exploring human freedom (or lack thereof) and the failures of "justice" around…

To be in chains is sometimes safer than to be free.
-Hastler

I knew nothing about this film going in. I basically thought it was a straight forward film about a man wrongfully accused of a crime, so I was thinking maybe I'd be lucky and it would turn out Hitchcockian. Turned out much more Kafkaesque for what are obvious reasons now.

You have Orson Welles adapting Franz Kafka's 1925 novel and it turns out exactly as brilliant as you would expect. First you have Anthony Perkins in the lead, and he's fantastic, but having him portray Josef K., a man arrested but never told why he faces a trial adds so many layers to the story that I imagine…

Orson Welles! What a man. There's no one in history quite like him. His films reflect his personality and his individuality so well. This is a great example.

The Trial is a dark, dystopian, nightmare-like picture depicting the accusation and eventual mental collapse of a Josef K., played masterfully by the legend Anthony Perkins. The darkness that surrounds his story permeates all of the scenes that follow his accusation at the beginning. It's incredibly unsettling.

From the jump, the film exhibits Welles's unmistakable style, starting with his voiceover narration setting the tone, and ending the same way. The tone therein seems to evoke a sort of Twilight Zone-esque type of mood, due to its dystopian and unnatural nature. The flow…

Before I get into the review itself, I have to nerd out a bit. Okay, so the parts of this were filmed in Zagreb, Croatia and for six years now I've been living about 15 minutes away from the place where the office scenes took place, so I am all giddy and overly excited because I didn't know about it until recently.

With that out of the way, I must say that I was pleasantly surprised. I never read Kafka's original text, but heard a lot about it, mainly from my mother who dismissed it as rather boring and confusing. So when I originally found out about this film and saw who was the director, I assumed it was a…

An absolutely maddening experience from Orson Welles that will test your patience as much as your sanity. A kaleidoscope of ideas designed specifically to melt the brain in the most frustrating way possible, like an invisible entity prodding you in the back of the head over and over again, or a nightmare that simply wont end.
Those with weak mental fortitude need not apply.

I was so, so on this, but my girlfriend loved it. She's the literary nut to my cineaste so it's to be expected - this is an adaptation of a Kafka novel, after all (something I was unaware of going in)

I appreciated the film on a philosophical level but I can't say I enjoyed it…