Kafka

Kafka (1991) is Steven Soderbergh's moody black-and-white thriller, free to watch online on iFILM. Jeremy Irons plays a meek Prague insurance clerk named Kafka who scribbles strange fiction by night.

When a coworker turns up dead, Kafka's careful routine unravels. He stumbles onto a cell of underground anarchists and runs headlong into faceless bureaucracy that hides a secret organization pulling the city's strings. Soderbergh shoots almost everything in stark monochrome, then floods the climax inside a sinister castle with sudden color; his Prague is a maze of shadows, staircases and locked doors.

This isn't a biopic — it's an invented mystery stitched from the writer's own books, The Trial and The Castle. Around Irons stand Theresa Russell, Ian Holm, Joel Grey and Alec Guinness. Cold, strange and deliberately uncomfortable, it was the swing Soderbergh took two years after winning the Palme d'Or for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Stream Kafka (1991) online on iFILM.