Franz (2025) Film Review: A Daring Biopic

Agnieszka Holland takes bold creative swings with Franz, a unique and daring biopic worthy of a literary titan like Kafka.

But rarely do filmmakers seem to really consider what the best way of approaching these stories might be and how to effectively capture their artistic spirit. Director Agnieszka Holland, however, hits you with one creative swing after the other to create a daring movie fit for such a bold literary voice.

Perhaps the most obvious way in which Franz shows its unconventional approach to the biopic is in how frequently it breaks the fourth wall. Most characters have scripted interviews throughout the movie in which they talk about Franz Kafka (Idan Weiss), complete with little outtakes that make it feel natural. It’s almost as if Franz was a documentary about the man that was recorded at the time of his life. Holland and cinematographer Tomasz Naumiuk also make frequent use of crash zooms that add to the feeling of improvisational camera work you might find in a documentary. Though there are plenty of more traditional shots and beautiful images in here as well.

Agnieszka Holland uses stylings of expressionism and magical realism found in Kafka’s work to tell his story. A large shadowy figure looms over Kafka in the opening scene. He runs into a mysterious double on a busy street. Throughout the movie his body goes through weird changes and takes on animal traits. But the weirdest and simultaneously most interesting element screenwriter Marek Epstein has brought to this biopic, and I imagine the most horrifying one to deal with for Franz Kafka, is the future that keeps intruding into the film and confronts Kafka with his own legacy.

After he moves out of his parents’ house and is left alone in his room, Kafka can’t shake the feeling that he’s being watched; he’s right to think so. Looking into his room are visitors of the Franz Kafka Museum in Prague that is erected around his room in modern times. After showing off a display with hundreds of letters, the tour guide jokes that, given how much Kafka wrote, he would probably be very popular on Twitter nowadays. In this moment, you realize you’re watching a very different biopic. Here, Agnieszka Holland directly confronts Franz Kafka with the image people would turn him into many years later.

Much of Kafka’s work was published after his death and against his wishes. If you walk into a bookstore today, you can pick up and read all of those stories that he wanted Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz, of I’m Your Man) to burn. Not just that, you can also pick up his personal diaries, where you can read about his anxiety and fear of being perceived. Perhaps you want to have a look at his private love letters to his wife, Felice (Carol Schuler), or even the secret letters of admiration he wrote to her best friend, Grete (Gesa Schermuly). At the aforementioned Franz Kafka Museum in Prague, you can visit an exact replica of his home, take a look at photographs of him as a child and his family, and even buy merchandise and take a picture with an actor like you’re at Disney World.

In a clever twist on the nature of biopics, Agnieszka Holland uses Franz to confront viewers with the fact that Kafka’s entire legacy is built on a complete disregard for privacy and a breach of trust by us and the people around him. It’s at this point you realize the 4th-wall-breaking interviews aren’t just a zany stylistic choice; they’re a tool to hammer in the point that Franz Kafka’s story is told by other people. Because he would never want to tell you. A man that hated the idea of standing in the limelight has had every detail revealed about him.

Adding this extra layer on top of a movie that already tries to cover a whole life becomes too much for this 2-hour movie to stem. For as interesting as this approach is to Kafka’s story, it does sacrifice some of the emotional attachment you miss out on by speeding through some of the personal drama in favor of intellectual deconstruction. It’s ultimately worth it for an entirely unique and fascinating biopic, but it comes with pacing issues. Perhaps a longer runtime could’ve ironically helped here to help make the movie drag less with a little more time to develop the many different moving pieces.

With Franz, Agnieszka Holland has crafted one of the most unconventional biopics in recent years. It’s filled with the same kind of bold creative swings as the writing of the person it’s dedicated to, before it deconstructs the biopic and uses its framework to remind us that its existence is a monument to a monumental breach of trust and privacy. And yet, with how important Franz Kafka and his works are to the Western canon, did Brod do us all a huge service by making sure Kafka would become the titan that he is?

Franz was screened at TIFF on September 5, 2025.