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The Trial Movie Review

The Trial is a 1962 drama film directed by Orson Welles and starring Anthony Perkins. It’s one of the director’s better and most underappreciated works.

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“To be in chains is sometimes safer than to be free“

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An unassuming office worker is arrested and stands trial, but he is never made aware of his charges in this Kafka adaptation of one of his best-known works. Apparently, Welles himself considered this film to be his best work, yet the movie was and still is largely underrated and not talked about enough. In my opinion, it is much more engaging and overall better than ‘Citizen Kane’, though I am clearly in huge minority here.

The best thing about this movie is its cinematography. While he has dabbled before in authentic, groundbreaking lighting techniques and camera angles, The Trial is where Welles focused the most on elevating the source material. The shadows are incredible, the lighting is fantastic, the black-and-white imagery is frequently quite gorgeous and some angles are downright brilliant, especially in their ambitious, all-encompassing nature.

The striking cinematography is complemented by strong score, excellent sound and incredible production design. The movie was shot in Zagreb and it has that old Yugoslavian architecture feel that perfectly fits this almost Communist and post-apocalyptic world. The buildings and especially their interiors were just gorgeous to witness and so cold in their imposingly huge stature. All of these aspects only added to the overall effect of alienation and paranoia, both perfectly achieved here.

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The only slight problem that I’ve had with this film is its very tedious pacing and structure. Yes, dialogue should be hugely important in any Kafka adaptation and it is phenomenal here. However, in a cinematic piece, you should not focus so extensively on dialogue. The technical aspects are so cinematic that they did elevate the movie to a truly artistic piece of cinema, but it needed more cinematic elements elsewhere, in particular in the action-thriller department. There are some intense sequences here, but the film needed more of those.

Still, the ending is amazing. It’s changed from the novel, but in a good way as it’s brutal and unforgettable. The whole movie is rather faithful to the source material, only changing little sequences to make them more cinematic, which was fine with me. The overall effect and atmosphere of the novel are left intact here, which was the most important thing to preserve.

Anthony Perkins was absolutely brilliant here. He was seriously snubbed by the Academy and his performance here and the whole movie remain underseen, but in reality this must have been his magnum opus as an actor and that’s because he was perfectly cast. He was a closeted gay man and his nervous body language and mannerisms were an impeccable fit for the character of Josef K. You can just feel his paranoia and endangerment in every scene.

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The supporting players in The Trial are very good, but not as memorable as the protagonist, though they all make a solid impression. Welles himself was excellent and larger than life while the female characters were also given a lot to do and those scenes really worked. I just wish that the pacing was better and the movie was more engaging, but overall it’s among the director’s best films.