Josef K wakes up in the morning and finds the police in his room. They inform him he is on trial, without exposing the reasons behind it. In order to find out more and protest his innocence, the man starts to look behind the facade of the judicial system. His efforts, however, seem to lead nowhere.

Citizen Kane? No—Orson Welles said that this dystopian Franz Kafka adaptation was his finest film. Shadowy with paranoia, The Trial makes masterful use of expressive cinematography and elaborate sets, marking out bureaucratic modern society as uniform yet incoherent, and inexplicably absurd.