Orson Welles famously said The Trial – not Citizen Kane, not The Magnificent Ambersons – was the finest film he ever made. The quote is generally taken with a grain of salt, but this Kafka adaptation would be a worthy pinnacle of any filmmaker. A wonderfully wry and squirrelly Anthony Perkins stars as an office worker who awakes one morning and finds himself accused by shadowy cops of a crime that is never revealed to him. He then must navigate a bizarre and confusing court system as he awaits his trial. It’s an old cliché to describe a movie as “nightmarish,” but it would be impossible to describe The Trial otherwise – it’s an odyssey of the surreal and paranoid, with Welles masterfully using set design, lighting, and camerawork to conjure a Kafkaesque fever dream.
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