Faust

A Prague man goes about an ordinary day until two strangers press a map into his hands. The map's cryptic markings become an obsession, drawing him through the city's streets to an abandoned building where a puppet stage waits. Once he puts on a Faust costume he finds there, the line between play and reality dissolves, and he is pulled into a strange staging of the Faust legend, performed by live actors, clay figures and oversized marionettes.

Jan Švankmajer wrote and directed this very loose adaptation of the Faust story, drawing on Marlowe's play, Goethe's version and other tellings of the scholar who bargains away his soul. It arrived between his short Darkness, Light, Darkness (1990) and Food (1996), within a run of features that also includes Little Otik (2001). Petr Čepek plays the central role, with Andrew Sachs voicing all the other characters and a group of dancers filling out the cast. Jaromír Kallista produced, and the film was made as a co-production between Germany, the United Kingdom, France and the Czech Republic, employing 46 credited crew members across its 97 minutes.

On IMDb, the film holds 7.4 out of 10 from around 4,700 votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 7.4 from 80 ratings, a pair of matching averages suggesting a modest but settled following. A critics' rating of 7.4 from 11 reviews places critical and audience responses at the same level.