About

Orson Welles’s The Trial is one of cinema’s most feverish nightmares. An adaptation of Franz Kafka’s classic novel, the film stars Anthony Perkins as Josef K, a young bank worker arrested for a crime that no one will specify. As he seeks answers about this mystery accusation, he finds himself in a bureaucratic labyrinth from which it seems he may never escape. Welles (who co-stars in the film) captures the jagged anxiety of K’s dilemma with expressionistic, monochromatic lighting that fills each frame with paranoid fervour, while showcasing the baroque detail of the mise en scene with his favoured deep focus cinematography. The film also opens with one of the most celebrated sequences in the director’s oeuvre: his vision of Kafka’s ‘Before the Law’ parable, rendered in exquisite detail through pinscreen animation (in which pins are painstakingly manoeuvred then lit from the side to create images on a screen) by Alexandre Alexeieff and Claire Parker. After a characteristically troubled production, The Trial was initially met with confusion from many critics; decades on, and multiple restorations later, the film is now widely recognised as a masterpiece and one of the director’s greatest achievements – with Welles himself even declaring “say what you like, but The Trial is the best film I have ever made.”

PG | Adult themes