In the often overly-pompous world of book blurbs and movie reviews, I’ve noticed that the word “kafkaesque” gets thrown around a little too easily. I’ve seen it used to describe everything from John Grisham novels to certain episodes of Stranger Things - the latter of which I’m sure had ol’ Franz rolling in his grave.

But rather than embark on some lengthy dissertation on the aesthetic values of one of the all-time greats of psychological fiction, on what it means for a film or book to be truly kafkaesque, I’d instead like to present to you this week’s Friday Night Flick, The Trial.

Other than a few minor chronological changes made to make the storyline easier to follow, Orson Welles’ take on The Trial is a faithful adaptation of the original novel by Kafka. It traces the fortunes of a man named Josef K. who - after being startled out of sleep one morning by a team of investigators - is arrested under vague circumstances.

When asked, the men refuse to produce their police credentials and deny Josef the right to know the crime he’s being charged with. Instead, they simply give him a trial date and vanish into the cold, gray, Yugoslavian dawn. And - as is typical for Kafka - the rest is a nightmarish downward spiral that plays on themes like power, paranoia, absurdity, and justice.

From a visual standpoint, The Trial nails the Kafka aesthetic. The film’s unsettling, boxy interiors have a way of inducing a slight claustrophobia that waxes and wanes throughout the film; in exterior scenes, Josef K. is effectively shrunk - both literally and symbolically - against a harsh, sprawling, industrial landscape; at one point, we get a sweeping shot of an army of identical-looking worker bees hunched over at their tiny desks, banging away at their typewriters in an uncanny unison; in another, a court full of stoic jurors suddenly explode into laughter, mocking and pointing at Josef K. as he sprints out of the room and straight into an interrogation chamber.

And of course, it’s all in duotone. Because if there were ever an author whose stories read in black, white, and - most prominently - gray, it was Kafka. — Jackson Todd