The Castle

Synopsis

From Michael Haneke comes this icy, beguiling, masterful adaptation of Kafka’s seminal novel, starring the late, great Ulrich Mühe (The Lives of Others, Funny Games). A land surveyor is summoned to a remote village by the local government, housed in ‘the castle’. But when he arrives he is unable to persuade the locals of his legitimacy and finds himself sucked into an bizarre spiral of provincial bureaucracy and petty social rivalries that soon becomes a surreal, all-encompassing nightmare. Throwing open a deep thematic vein in Haneke’s work, this stunning parable of alienation and absurdity highlights important parallels between the two artists’ oeuvres, making it an unappreciated yet crucial part of his glittering career.