Kafka

Kafka is a 1991 mystery drama set in Prague, where an insurance clerk and aspiring writer leads a quiet double life until a colleague is found dead. The loss pushes him out of his passivity and into a shadowy underworld of underground groups and secret organizations whose reach extends across society. As more bodies surface and a woman he has grown close to disappears, he is driven to confront the forces behind the deaths himself.

Steven Soderbergh directed the film, his second feature after sex, lies, and videotape (1989), from a screenplay by Lem Dobbs. Jeremy Irons plays the title role, with Theresa Russell, Joel Grey, Ian Holm, Jeroen Krabbé and Armin Mueller-Stahl among the large credited cast, and Harry Benn and Stuart Cornfeld producing. The production, a United States and France co-production, had a budget of 11 million dollars.

Kafka blends drama, mystery and science fiction, imagining its central figure inside a threatening, bureaucratic world that echoes his own writing. On IMDb it holds a 6.4/10 rating from 161 votes, while the film critics' rating stands at 5.6/10 from 23 reviews. The film runs 98 minutes and was released on November 15, 1991. It sits between Soderbergh's debut and his 1995 film The Underneath.