On demand: "The Castle/Das Schloss"

Amid his reputation-making late Nineties run of festival-hailed provocations, Michael Haneke found time to complete The Castle, a suitably frosty, quietly fascinating Kafka adaptation that was originally made for television, but screened at the Berlin film festival and subsequently circulated in cinemas. Ulrich Mühe, observed months before making Funny Games and a decade before his international breakout role as the eavesdropping protagonist of 2006's The Lives of Others, is the weary traveller who arrives in a drab snowbound village to oversee a surveying project at the nearby castle, only to grasp something somewhere's gone awry: a gruff functionary threatens to have him turfed from his lodgings for not having the right permit, higher-ups debate whether there was even an order issued to summon a surveyor, the roads don't go anywhere, and the surveyor doesn't recognise the buffoonish boys who show up claiming to be his old assistants. Consolation is taken in a growing intimacy with a local barmaid (Susanne Lothar, the mum in Funny Games and Mühe's real-life partner), but it still seems an ominous sign that this woman is the aforementioned functionary's mistress. There are, after all, certain states in this world where love is dangerous, if not an impossibility; where your identity (indeed, your very existence) is apt to be denied, tentative at best; and where conformity is man's default setting. It's no less chilling to encounter that message in a German-language film of the late 20th century than it is to receive that message in the Britain of the mid-2020s.

For all that, Haneke approaches this text less as a political lesson than as a formal challenge. He doesn't deny the literariness of the source, using Kafka's prose as the basis for some spare narration, nor that it was left unfinished (hence the open ending, which allows the drama to spill out into our present-day reality); instead, he imposes his own will on this material in the form of sudden fadeouts that unsettle us anew whenever we begin to believe we're finding our bearings. These blackouts highlight just how much of Kafka's plotting - and this is, very definitely, one of those plots that feels like a plot - is happening off-camera, and has to be relayed to us in reported speech. (The title stands for everything we don't see, that is refused or denied to us.) Two frowningly Mitteleuropan sensibilities merge in the willingness to challenge, even baffle an audience - to give us something we just have to get our heads around. It'd be perverse to expect a lighter, funnier Kafka adaptation, but there are points where you start to feel Haneke overdoing the grey. (We have time to notice the drabness, given how many scenes involve our hero scurrying around in circles, whether chasing his own tail or following begrimed water down the plughole.) It also wouldn't surprise me if a restless 21st century audience started questioning why the surveyor doesn't flee from a place that so clearly doesn't want him around - though that would be to say that this state would let him go, and that he's not merely a victim to be toyed with, as a cat might a mouse. Buried somewhere in here is a blackly ironic joke: the protagonist gets no surveying done in the term's usual professional sense, but he gets a detailed feel for how certain systems work, the empty promises and mutual backscratching, the innuendo and implication that qualifies as insider knowledge. (Being an outsider, a complete picture of what he's up against is beyond his reach - and ours.) Either way, Haneke succeeds in evoking a terse, closed-off, murderously oppressive world, a spiritual dead end founded on prisons self-made and otherwise. Stony-faced in its renunciation of the showmanship that crept into Welles's The Trial, this Castle is finally as much Haneke as it is Kafka: it invites reading as the driest of runs for both Code Unknown and The White Ribbon, from that moment this filmmaker began constructing these types of puzzling, sociologically charged nightmares by himself.

The Castle is now streaming via Curzon Home Cinema and Prime Video.