Plot: When Josef wakes up, police are storming into his bedroom to arrest him. When he asks them what the charges are, they don't want to give him any answers. It's the start of a bewildering experience that hurls Josef into a judicial system that never seems to make sense and that doesn't have a clear exit.
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January 06, 2025
I was going to start by calling this film Kafkaesque, but it turns out The Trial is an actual adaptation of one of Kafka's novels, so yeah. If the story of a man stuck in an absurd legal system sounds like it'll be a critique of our bewildering bureaucratic structures, you now know the reason.
This is one of Orson Welles' better films, though the second hour is a tad repetitive. Once the point of the film is made, Josef simply goes through variations of the same absurdities, which gets a little boring after a while. The performances are decent though, the build-up of the film is interesting and Welles and Kafka make a fair point, but a shorter edit would've been better.