THE CASTLE

A land surveyor is invited to a village castle to carry out his work, but discovers upon arrival that seemingly no one is expecting him. His attempts to prove his integrity are met with a stone wall of incomprehension, which only grows his desire to gain entry into the mysterious castle.

While Aleksey Balabanov would go on to allegorise Soviet history in his later period films, this adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel remains remarkably faithful. A carnivalesque romp of absurdity and futility with shades of Béla Tarr and Federico Fellini, The Castle is one of Balabanov’s early greats.