Franz 2025 is a daring, often playful Franz Kafka biopic from director Agnieszka Holland that swaps the usual cradle-to-grave formula for a kaleidoscopic, time-hopping portrait.
It’s anchored by Idan Weiss as Kafka and a sensibility that toggles between period detail and present-day reflections on Kafka’s legacy. At its best, Franz feels alive to the author’s inner weather; at its weakest, a few museum-set contemporary interludes blunt the momentum. Still, this is a confident, idea-rich film that fans of literary biopics—and of Holland—should seek out.
Quick facts
- Title: Franz (2025)
- Director: Agnieszka Holland
- Writer: Marek Epstein (story by Epstein & Mike Downey)
- Cast (highlights): Idan Weiss (Franz Kafka), Jenovéfa Boková (Milena Jesenská), Carol Schuler (Felice Bauer), Sebastian Schwarz (Max Brod)
- Cinematography: Tomasz Naumiuk • Editing: Pavel Hrdlicka
- World premiere: Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), September 5, 2025
- Runtime: 127 minutes (festival program listing)
- Countries: Czech Republic/Poland/Germany/France/Turkey
- Language: Czech (primarily)
What Franz 2025 is actually doing
Rather than reenacting famous pages (The Trial, The Castle, Metamorphosis), Franz takes a mosaic approach—sliding between the past and the present, juxtaposing Kafka’s formative experiences with the way he’s curated and consumed now (yes, including the Prague museum). The effect is less “biopic as Wikipedia” and more biopic as conversation: between Kafka the man and Kafka the myth, between private pain and public posterity.
TIFF’s capsule directly points to this past-present toggling and “tour de force portrait,” while the official synopses (Rotten Tomatoes/Letterboxd) emphasize the kaleidoscopic structure that reframes the canonized author.
Holland and Epstein also avoid the winking literalism that haunts many writer biopics (no cutaway where Kafka sees a beetle and bam—Metamorphosis). Reviewers noticed—and split on it. Pajiba, for instance, argues that Franz is “not especially Kafkaesque,” praising the refusal to over-illustrate the books; others loved the inventiveness and how the film honors Kafka’s sensibility without turning the movie into footnotes.
Performances: Why Idan Weiss matters
Idan Weiss (sometimes spelled Veiss in early coverage) is the film’s hinge. Multiple festival write-ups comment on how eerily right he looks and feels—a presence more than a performance, which is exactly what this kind of portrait needs. That Shelf goes as far as saying it feels like Kafka’s famed photograph sprung to life, and even mixed reviews single out Weiss as Franz’s beating heart. (That Shelf)
Around him, the supporting cast—Jenovéfa Boková (Milena), Carol Schuler (Felice), and Sebastian Schwarz (Max Brod)—give Franz 2025 its emotional triangulation: lovers who saw the tenderness and conflict in Kafka, and Brod, the friend who defied Kafka’s wish to burn the manuscripts (arguably the reason we’re even here). The casting and roles are confirmed in the production notes and trade listings. (Wikipedia)
Plot Summary
Franz opens with a visual feint that announces Agnieszka Holland’s method: a single, striking passage from boyhood to adulthood as Franz Kafka crosses a threshold and, in the cut, becomes the man we will follow. The gesture collapses time and sets the tone for a film that will keep folding the past into the present—and the present back into the past—rather than march chronologically from cradle to grave.
From the outset, two tracks run in counterpoint. On the period track, we move through the most charged nodes of Kafka’s life: his family apartment, the insurance office where he labors by day, the tentative spaces of friendship and romance, and finally the sanatoria and rooms of illness where the young writer’s life narrows. On the present-day track, Holland periodically cuts to 2025 Prague—Franz Kafka Museum exhibits, guided tour groups, and a small industry of T-shirts, trinkets, and brand tie-ins—suggesting that Kafka’s name has become a commodity as much as a legacy.
These intrusions are sometimes deadpan and sometimes disquieting, and Franz 2025 leans into their oddness: tourists drift through a shot of Franz walking or even parade through a riverside scene where he swims, as if time had sprung a leak.
Within the period story, we first meet Franz (Idan Weiss) as an intensely watchful young man under the psychic weather of a domineering father. The paternal presence isn’t over-explained; instead, Holland and screenwriter Marek Epstein stage tableaux that project authority and heat without speeches.
Franz, already a scribbler at night, dims himself in daylight, making himself small at home and smaller still at his desk in the insurance office. Franz 2025 doesn’t dramatize specific pages of Kafka’s books; it plays the feelings that might have preceded them—frustration, absurd humor, the sense of being watched, the pressure of forms and procedures.
In one of the movie’s signature linkages, Franz’s office anxiety is visualized as arrays of staring eyes, which we realize are modern museum visitors peering at the reproduced workspace—a double exposure of time that makes his interior terror a present-day spectacle.
Holland threads in romances not as detours but as tests of selfhood. Felice Bauer (Carol Schuler) surfaces in a series of encounters that track a tender pull-and-recoil rhythm; the relationship reads as sincere yet contested by Franz’s own exacting temperament.
Later, Milena Jesenská (Jenovéfa Boková) brings a different gravity—an intellectual voltage and emotional candor that draw Franz out, even as his ambivalence keeps him half a beat out of sync with intimacy. Neither romance is reduced to “origin stories” for the books; each is framed as a real attachment Franz wants but can’t settle into without friction.
Throughout, Max Brod (Sebastian Schwarz) hovers at the edge of scenes—loyal friend, literary confidant, and eventually custodian of the work—the offscreen pivot on which Kafka’s posthumous fame will later turn.
In a mid-film stretch, Holland escalates the interplay of surreal impression and documentary puncture. We see Franz at his desk, then Franz on a path, Franz in water, and time splinters. A 2025 tour group walks directly through the frame, selfie-sticks aloft; a docu-like montage of Kafka-branded snacks and signage underlines the commodification of a man who feared misunderstanding while alive. These playful yet barbed scenes refuse the comfort of a sealed period piece and insist that our consumption of Kafka—the museums, the merch, the “Kafkaesque” shorthand—is part of the story.
Back in the period line, illness creeps into the edges of frames. Holland doesn’t pathologize him early; instead, she lets light coughs and waning appetite accumulate into a visible shrinkage of horizons.
The insurance job becomes harder to sustain; the nights of writing grow both more urgent and more austere. Weiss plays these transitions not as grand gestures but as retreats—Franz tightens, and his gaze turns inward, as if the world has become too loud to parse.
Franz 2025 keeps its distance from straightforward literary reenactment—no beetles, no trial corridors—but ghosts of The Trial, The Castle, and The Metamorphosis flicker through blocking, lighting, and sound design that tilt reality a few degrees off level.
A crucial dramatic hinge arrives in conversations with Max Brod. Franz 2025 condenses years into intimate, low-key exchanges—two friends talking about the work, its audience, and (with mounting clarity) its afterlife.
Franz, exhausted and clear-eyed, voices the now-famous request: that his manuscripts be destroyed. Holland refuses melodrama; there’s no speechifying, just the unbearable simplicity of a dying writer asking to vanish on his own terms. Later scenes mirror and answer this moment: Max with the manuscripts, Max listening to others talk about Franz, Max in rooms where it’s easier to betray a friend than betray literature.
Franz 2025 doesn’t lawyer the ethics; it superimposes 2025 talking heads and staged interviews that break the fourth wall, letting critics, curators, and ordinary visitors argue, implicitly or explicitly, that Kafka’s legacy exists because someone ignored his wish.
The effect is accusatory and complicating at once: we are the beneficiaries of a breach of trust, and the film makes it hard to look away from that bargain.
As the final act gathers, Holland keeps cutting between the closing rooms of 1924 and present-day spaces that house Kafka’s life as exhibition. Franz’s world narrows to bare essentials: a bed, breath that has to be earned, and pages that still ask to be shaped.
The sanatoria scenes are staged with restraint rather than medical detail; Weiss’s stillness becomes the performance, a body cooling into quiet while the mind flickers with intermittent brightness. In one of Franz 2025 ’s tenderest passages, moments with Ottla Kafka (Kafka’s beloved sister) register as rest—a hush around the man who increasingly seems baffled by the attention he draws even before he’s gone. (The film keeps the family cluster in view without pushing any one member to the foreground beyond what Franz can bear.)
Death itself is not spectacularized: no operatic curtain, only diminishing frames, softer sound, and the sense of a signal fading. In the immediate afterimage, Holland refuses closure. The camera returns to Max, who is now effectively the protagonist of the coda; the choice—to burn or to publish—has already been made (history tells us which), and the film shows ripples rather than gavel strikes. Papers are handled, sorted, packed; we see rooms where literature survives precisely because friendship failed at the final request.
These images then dovetail into the present, the museum vitrines, the tours, the bookshop shelves, and even food counters—Kafka as itinerary and icon—until the film has sketched a paradox: Franz Kafka lives in our time because Franz Kafka could not be left alone in his.
A handful of modern sequences interrogate the audience directly. People on camera (some framed like vox-pops, others like curators) speak about Kafka, his loneliness, his illness, and the seductive shorthand of “Kafkaesque,” which modern discourse loves to use but rarely defines. These interludes have been divisive with festival audiences; inside the story, they function as chorus—our chorus—that both celebrates and consumes the author.
The eyes-as-exhibit motif returns: the same gaze that once unsettled Franz has become our gaze, trained on glass cases and frozen moments. The movie leaves you with the unease that this act of looking is part of what the work is now—public, curated, and profitable.
In the very last movements, Franz 2025 circles back to a note of human scale. Brief memories—a workplace jest, a river’s hush, a look shared across a table—are replayed without commentary, as if the mind were grasping at unspectacular happiness.
Holland resists the tidy lesson and lets the final impression be ambivalence: the soft-spoken friend whose letters and fragments will matter more than he imagined; the lover who tried; the son who didn’t stop needing approval; the writer who wanted his words to end with him.
And then the present returns one last time—the exhibit lights, the gift shop, the hum of attention as commerce—so that the cut to black feels like a curtain between worlds that won’t quite close.
Through this kaleidoscopic weave, Franz tells a straight story sidelong: Franz Kafka’s becoming, his unlived futures, and the afterlife decided for him by those who loved him, those who profited from him, and those of us who need him—readers, tourists, and viewers alike.
The plot points are familiar—youth, work, love, illness, death, publication—but Holland’s structure rearranges emphasis, making the posthumous era as narratively potent as the biographical one.
It leaves Franz not in 1924 but in our present, multiplied into posters, placards, and pilgrimages, asking whether this endless presentness is faith, betrayal, or simply the cost of being read.
Direction & tone: Holland’s “punky” spin
In interviews around the premiere, Holland calls her approach “punky”—she wants to rehumanize Kafka, dislodging him from the museum pedestal and letting him be funny, awkward, searching.
That’s consistent with the film’s form: jump cuts across time, stylized tableaux, and an occasional absurdist wink that nods to Kafka’s humor (often forgotten in dour adaptations). The Film Verdict and Screen Daily both highlight this energy and Holland’s intent to reach younger viewers who might recognize themselves in Kafka’s restlessness and self-doubt.
The look & the cut: images that remember and forget
Shot by Tomasz Naumiuk, the film balances period texture with present-day crispness, so the past feels felt, not embalmed, and the now feels nervy, not merely explanatory. The edit (Pavel Hrdlicka) keeps the film moving, particularly when it counterpoints intimate scenes from Kafka’s life with modern museum beats.
Some critics found the museum passages disruptive, breaking the magical trance; others saw them as the whole point, daring the audience to look at how we turn artists into exhibits. The Daily Beast lands right in that debate: visually dynamic overall, but the modern museum scenes “feel awkward” to some.
Where Franz soars
- It dodges “Greatest Hits” biopic syndrome. Instead of marching through major works, Holland draws a map of feelings—ambition, shame, desire, filial friction—that explain the work without explaining it away.
- It trusts viewers. Franz 2025 assumes you know something about Kafka and rewards you for it with layered callbacks and visual rhymes. (RT’s synopsis and TIFF’s notes both frame Franz as a perspective shift, not a lecture.)
- Weiss is quietly magnetic. His stillness reads as thought, not emptiness—a tough trick in biopics about writers, who mostly… sit and think.
Where it stumbles
A mini-wave of reviews argues that the modern-day inserts can feel didactic or clunky, especially in contrast with the supple period scenes. The Forward calls the movie “detached from the work he’s famous for,” while Pajiba’s quibble is essentially the flipside of a virtue: Franz refuses to be “Kafkaesque” in the on-the-nose sense—no nightmare bureaucracy, no insect metaphors—which may leave some viewers wanting more “Kafka” in Kafka.
Verdict: See it
If you’re allergic to Wikipedia-with-actors biopics, Franz is the antidote: inventive without being cutesy, emotionally alive without melodrama. Even when the present-day framing hiccups, the film’s curiosity and compassion win out. For festival-goers and streamers alike, it’s a must—and for students and writers, a quietly inspiring look at how an awkward kid from Prague became a language we use to describe the world.
Who will like Franz 2025?
- Yes: fans of Agnieszka Holland, literary biopics that take risks, viewers into nonlinear structure, anyone curious how legacy is made.
- Maybe not: viewers craving straight chronology and plotty milestones, or those hoping for a film that literalizes Kafka’s surreal imagery.
Release, runtime, and where to watch
- World premiere: TIFF 2025 (Special Presentations), Sept 5, 2025. Wider release TBA; distributors listed in European territories (Bioscop, Kino Świat, X Verleih). Runtime: 127 minutes (festival listings). Keep an eye on TIFF and local distributor pages for theatrical dates.
Franz (2025 film) — Directed by Agnieszka Holland; written by Marek Epstein (from a story by Epstein & Mike Downey); starring Idan Weiss, Jenovéfa Boková, Carol Schuler, Sebastian Schwarz; cinematography by Tomasz Naumiuk; editing by Pavel Hrdlicka; produced by Marlene Film Production, Metro Films, X Filme Creative Pool. (Wikipedia)
What other critics are saying
- Inventive & fittingly unconventional: Daily Beast praises the film’s nonlinear daring and performances, while flagging the museum sequences as rhythm breakers.
- “Not especially Kafkaesque” (and that’s okay?): Pajiba notes the deliberate avoidance of literal Kafka tropes, focusing instead on perspective and character.
- “Daring biopic” with bold swings: Loud and Clear highlights form and ambition; 127-minute runtime noted.
- “Captures the essence” through structure: Next Best Picture applauds the past/present intercutting that channels what Kafkaesque means without props.
- Euphoric cast praise: That Shelf singles out Weiss’s uncanny embodiment of Kafka.
FAQ
Is Franz 2025 a traditional biopic?
No. It’s a nonlinear, kaleidoscopic portrait that jumps between eras, including contemporary museum scenes that comment on Kafka’s afterlife.
Who plays Franz Kafka?
Idan Weiss (spelled Veiss in some outlets). He’s widely praised for an uncanny likeness and interiority.
Does the film show literal versions of Kafka’s stories?
Mostly no—Holland avoids “greatest-hits” literalizations in favor of inner-life textures and modern reframings.
When will Franz be released widely?
After TIFF 2025, regional distributors are in place; theatrical/streaming dates are TBA.
What’s the runtime?
About 127 minutes (festival program listing).
One line you can quote
Agnieszka Holland’s Franz 2025 is a nonlinear, playful, and unusually humane Kafka biopic—more interested in how Kafka feels than in illustrating his plot points.
