Franz Kafka's a Country DoctorMovies like Franz Kafka's a Country Doctor
- Key Features:
- Surrealism, Existentialism, Medical drama, Nightmare, Despair, Isolation, Guilt, Powerlessness, Social commentary, Symbolism, Psychological horror, Kafkaesque
- Tone:
- serious, surreal, poetic
- Target Audience:
- Fans of surreal and experimental films, Viewers interested in philosophical themes, Those familiar with Kafkas works, Audiences seeking thought-provoking cinema
- Emotional Arc:
- Urgency → Confusion → Despair
Franz Kafka's a Country Doctor

A hapless country doctor describes with breathless urgency a night-time summons to attend a young patient. Events soon take on a surreal aspect as "unearthly horses" transport him instantaneously to the bedside. The doctor, preoccupied with personal distractions and grievances against those he is employed to care for, fails to find what is revealed to be a vile, fatal wound. He is humiliated by the villagers, who are "always expecting the impossible from the doctor," and doomed to an endless return trip, losing everything.
Franz Kafka's a Country Doctor
An unnamed doctor has always had everything he's ever wanted, but that has only made him develop more extreme and depraved needs. He kidnaps a young couple in the prime of their life together and forces them into a game of torment that slowly extinguishes their hopes for survival.

A director faces creative block while working on his latest film – a reimagination of his adolescence growing up in a mountain village in rural Japan.

Aspiring to an easy job as personal physician to a wealthy family, Noboru Yasumoto is disappointed when his first post after medical school takes him to a small country clinic under the gruff doctor Red Beard. Yasumoto rebels in numerous ways, but Red Beard proves a wise and patient teacher. He gradually introduces his student to the unglamorous side of the profession, ultimately assigning him to care for a prostitute rescued from a local brothel.

A monumental windstorm and an abused horse's refusal to work or eat signal the beginning of the end for a poor farmer and his daughter.

Infection takes place in a dark, isolated hospital, where one doctors mistake has led to dire consequences for a patient. In a hospital death is just a breath away.

All the people in this countryside area, can count on Jean-Pierre, the doctor who auscultates them, heals and reassures them day and night, 7 days a week. Now Jean-Pierre is sick, so he sees Natalie, a young doctor, coming from the hospital to assist him. But will she adapt to this new life and be able to replace the man that believed to be irreplaceable?

After escaping from an insane asylum, a medical student assumes the identity of a mysterious dead man, who appears to be his doppelganger, and gets lured to a sinister island ruled by a mad scientist and his malformed men.

The inhabitants of a small Japanese town become increasingly obsessed with and tormented by spirals.

Using almost no dialogue, the film follows a number of residents (both human and animal) of a small rural community in Hungary – an old man with hiccups, a shepherdess and her sheep, an old woman who may or may not be up to no good, some folk-singers at a wedding, etc. While most of the film is a series of vignettes, there is a sinister and often barely perceptible subplot involving murder.

The year is 1917. We are in the Russian countryside. It is the middle of freezing winter. A pale young, newly educated doctor arrives. Having to deal with one medical challenge after another he soon becomes the center of everyone's attention. To soothe the impressions of human suffering he turns to morphine.

It's about a country doctor that comes to the city while a clinic is built in his home town... he rubs off his care and compassion on others at the hospital with his humor and wit.

When land surveyor K arrives at a small village that houses a castle, local authorities refuse to allow him to enter. As he tries to convince the officials that they sent for him, they clamp down with increasingly complicated bureaucratic obstacles.

A country romance about the human streak in the horse and the horse in the human. Love and death become interlaced and with terrible consequences. The fortunes of the people in the country through the horses' perception.

A man takes up residence with a mysterious marquis and is soon persuaded to enter into an asylum for preventative therapy. Things are not what they seem, and the marquis may be even more sinister than what the young man might have predicted.

An unsettling feeling overwhelms a small Hungarian town when two orthodox Jews arrive with a mysterious trunk. As residents begin to speculate on the purpose of the visit of these two strangers, order starts to crumble in town with some pursuing devious plans and others finding remorse in their hearts.

A doctor conducts experiments on patients which end up in anguish!

In 1980s East Germany, Barbara is a Berlin doctor banished to a country medical clinic for applying for an exit visa. Deeply unhappy with her reassignment and fearful of her co-workers as possible Stasi informants, Barbara stays aloof, especially from the good natured clinic head, Andre.

Mizuki's husband Yusuke has been missing for three years. He suddenly comes back home as a ghost and asks Mizuki to go on a trip with him. Their trip consists of visiting the people that helped Yusuke on his previous travel.

Kaveh Nariman is a Doctor in the medical examiner's office. One day at his work he meets a corpse which is very familiar to him.

On Christmas eve, Serge is the only on-call emergency doctor available. Struck by a crippling back-ache, he gets help from a pizza delivery boy who will need to step in the doctor's shoes.

An old villager deeply in love with his cow goes to the capital for a while. While he's there, the cow dies and now the villagers are afraid of his possible reaction to it when he returns.

A young pathologist seeks answers to the mysterious death of a friend and soon comes into contact with the same cursed videotape that caused the death of the friend's wife and son, which is haunted by the curse of Sadako, a relentless spirit.

When Dr. Pieter Fales' patients start receiving ominous letters and getting murdered by an unknown black-clad assailant, he and his daughter both come under suspicion.

Three surreal depictions of failures of communication that occur on all levels of human society.

A painter facing a creative block arranges to spend the weekend in the country at his mistress's villa. While staying there, his sanity begins to disintegrate.

The film follows Kaspar Hauser, who lived the first seventeen years of his life chained in a tiny cellar with only a toy horse to occupy his time, devoid of all human contact except for a man who wears a black overcoat and top hat who feeds him.

Alone on a farm, a man spends his days tending to his animals, with a particular love for his sow. After an illicit encounter between the two creatures, the pig gives birth. However, tragedy strikes when the man tries to force the newborn piglets to love him as he loves them.

Jenny, a young doctor who feels guilty after a young woman she refused to see winds up dead a few days later, decides to find out who the girl was, after the police can't identify the young woman.

In the aftermath of a personal tragedy, Harper retreats alone to the beautiful English countryside, hoping to find a place to heal. But someone — or something — from the surrounding woods appears to be stalking her, and what begins as simmering dread becomes a fully-formed nightmare, inhabited by her darkest memories and fears.

Mikael is doctor on night call. It’s a vocation. Between two patient-visits in slum areas, he cares for those whom no one else wants to see: the drug addicts, the homeless… He rubs shoulders with destitution. His life is in shambles. Especially when it comes to his pharmacist cousin who makes him write false prescriptions for Subutex. Overnight, he decides to get out of drug trafficking and rebuild his life. But there will be a heavy price to pay.

A young man awakens in the hospital after an accident wipes his memory. Fascinated by a textbook full of drawings of dissections, Hiroshi is drawn to medical school. There he catches the eye of a fellow student, but it's another who becomes his obsession: the dead woman on the cadaver table.

An American journalist travels through 19th-century Japan to find the prostitute he fell in love with but instead learns of the physical and existential horror that befell her after he left.

Neurosurgeon Koichi uses an experimental technique to enter the brain of his beloved Atsumi, who is in a coma after attempting suicide. In his quest, Koichi drifts steadily further into the sweltering marshes of the spirit. It is soon no longer clear what is real and what is not.

A busy attorney, worried that his anorexic daughter Olga, who is still grieving her recently deceased mother, might try to harm herself, sends her to see a psychiatrist who's dealing with her own loss in an unusual way.

Akira works as a lawyer. One day, he meets with his former client Rie, who asks Akira to perform a background check on her late husband Daisuke.

A psychiatrist, Martin Dysart, investigates the savage blinding of six horses with a metal spike in a stable in Hampshire, England. The atrocity was committed by an unassuming seventeen-year-old stable boy named Alan Strang, the only son of an opinionated but inwardly-timid father and a genteel, religious mother. As Dysart exposes the truths behind the boy's demons, he finds himself face-to-face with his own.

A disillusioned filmmaker has an encounter with a young woman who has a ritual of repeating "Tomorrow is my birthday" everyday. He tries to communicate with her through his video camera.

When a notorious German serial killer is captured after committing some of the most heinous acts against humanity ever imaginable, a farmer and police officer from a sleepy rural community on the outskirts of Berlin is drawn into the case as he searches for the answers to a murder that has shaken his tight-knit community.

A young woman is invited by her girlfriend, who lives in an English country mansion, to stay there with her. The estate, however, isn't quite what it seems--and neither is the friend who issued the invitation.

Eight visually rich vignettes drawn from Kurosawa’s own dreams—fox weddings and vanished orchards, a soldier’s ghosts, a walk through Van Gogh’s canvases, nuclear nightmares, and a water-mill utopia—meditate on childhood, art, mortality, and humanity’s uneasy bond with nature.

Grotesquely surreal offering charting three male generations of the same bizarre family, including a pervert who constantly seeks for new kinds of satisfaction, an obese speed eater, and a passionate embalmer.

Saint-Maurice, an ordinary peaceful village, lived healthily so much so that the local doctor's practice was scant. But that was before Dr. Parpalaid retired and was replaced by a charlatan by the name of Knock. A real genius this one, for he soon managed to persuade everyone that they were ill. And not only didn't they resent him but they even loved their physician, who made a fortune and brought prosperity to the village by turning it into a big hospital.

Every person you meet is fighting a battle you don't know anything about. Lena comes to the countryside to collect and take things out of the house she has sold. neighbor igor interferes with her plans. he sits in a tree around the clock and screams driving lena crazy.

A detective starts spiraling out of control when a wave of gruesome murders with seemingly similar bizarre circumstances is sweeping Tokyo.

The surreal tale of an unassuming man who is accused of a never-specified crime and shambles through bizarre encounters to escape this nightmare.

After a colleague is murdered, insurance worker Kafka gets embroiled in an underground group who are attempting to thwart a secret organization that controls the major events in society.

One day, hospital orderlies, watching corpse in the morgue, recognize film director. Man, even though he died, he begins to remember his life. He made a career making movies, had numerous mistresses, but never realized their dreams. His life was interspersed with many setbacks that enfeebled him from the inside. Although he made a career in film, he was not happy with his life.

Seven episodes, each taking place on a different day of the week, on the theme of suicide and violent death.

A story about director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s parents who were both doctors, and his memories of growing up in a hospital environment.

A vacationing entomologist suffers extreme physical and psychological trauma after being taken captive by the residents of a poor seaside village and made to live with a woman whose life task is shoveling sand for them.

In a small village in a valley everyone who reaches the age of 70 must leave the village and go to a certain mountain top to die. If anyone should refuse they would disgrace their family. Old Orin is 69. This winter it is her turn to go to the mountain. But first she must make sure that her eldest son Tatsuhei finds a wife.

A postman learns that he doesn't have much time left to live due to a terminal illness. A devil then appears in front of him and offers to extend his life if he picks something in the world that will disappear. The man thinks about his relationships with ex-friends, ex-lovers, relatives and colleagues who will be sincerely sad when he dies.

Medical student Paula wins a place at an exclusive Heidelberg medical school. When the body of a young man she met on the train turns up on her dissection table, she begins to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death.

A city boy visits a remote village to find out the reason behind his father's strange death. The locals are watching his every move and are eager to see him leave. As he starts to investigate, the village's sinister secrets begin to unravel.

Dissipated Tokyo playwright, Kosuke has retreated to the countryside after deciding that he's done with women, but the indefatigable cat-in-heat Shiori has other ideas, clinging to Kosuke like his shadow.

When a machine that allows therapists to enter their patient's dreams is stolen, all hell breaks loose. Only a young female therapist can stop it and recover it before damage is done: Paprika.

A group of travelers is stranded in a small country inn when the river floods during heavy rains. As the bad weather continues, tensions rise amongst the trapped travelers.

Two young men seek the solitude of the country; their peace is disturbed when a set of random occurrences suggest to their susceptible minds a pattern with sinister meanings.

A doctor in early 19th-century Germany becomes infatuated with the sister of a man he unintentionally killed and bargains with the Devil incarnate to conjure their union in exchange for his soul.

A priest-doctor chasing a man with supernatural regenerative abilities, who has recently escaped from a medical lab, reaches a small town where the mutant goes on a killing spree.

A black comedy about a farmer who tries to bring home the body of his friend, who died far from their town.

November 1999. 67-year-old Trond lives in new-found solitude and looks forward to spending New Year's Eve 2000 alone. As winter arrives he discovers he has a neighbor, a man Trond knew back in 1948, the summer he turned 15 and the summer Trond's father prepared him to carry the burden of his forthcoming betrayal and disappearance.

A director and screenwriter pen a script and, in the process, blur the line between fiction and reality.

After suffering terrible headaches and stomach cramps, Mr. Lăzărescu, a lonely 63 year-old man, calls for an ambulance, beginning one man’s hellish journey through Bucharest hospitals in search of proper medical care. As the night unfolds, his health starts to deteriorate fast.

A doctor finds himself in the middle of an unsolved serial murder case after discovering a secret from a sedated patient. When dismembered bodies show up close to home, he must solve the riddle before the killer realizes what he knows.

Louise and Kasper want to become parents, but Louise cannot have children. She seals a pact with her Romanian maid, Elena, to bear her child, but things don't turn out quite as planned...

After the Japanese defeat to the Russians, Kaji leads the last remaining men through Manchuria. Intent on returning to his dear wife and his old life, Kaji faces great odds in a variety of different harrowing circumstances as he and his fellow men sneak behind enemy lines.

A lawyer tasked with defending a robbery-and-murder suspect begins developing doubts about what truly happened.

An artist dealing with the grief of his wife leaving him finds solace in painting the squalor of the sewer. He discovers a trapped mermaid, whom he brings home to heal. Her condition worsens, and she asks the artist to paint her before she dies.

Having fathered an illegitimate child with his lover, Marie, feckless soldier Franz Woyzeck takes odd jobs around his small town to provide some extra money for them. One job is volunteering for experiments conducted by a local doctor, who puts Woyzeck on a diet of peas. This serves to drive him close to madness, and the discovery that Marie is involved in an affair with the local drum major exacerbates the situation. Pushed too far, Woyzeck resorts to violence.

A family of four are the sole inhabitants of a small island, where they struggle each day to irrigate their crops.

Every day, Jay travels the length and breadth of Tokyo in his taxi, looking for his daughter Lily. In the 9 years since he has separated from his wife, he has never been able to get custody of his daughter. Having given up hope of ever seeing her again, he is about to move back to France when Lily hops in his cab. But she doesn't recognize him.

In the 15th century, a young goatherd living alone in a mountain hut feels a dark presence in the woods.

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip with her friends to visit her aunt's ancestral house in the countryside. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.

On a summer day in late 19th century Russia, a group of bourgeois friends and acquaintances gather at a dilapidated country estate.

A human body gradually reconstructs itself as its various component parts crowd themselves into a small room and eventually, after much experimentation, sort out which part goes where.

A man wanders into a seemingly deserted town with his young son in search of work. But after a bit of bad luck, he joins the town's population of lost souls.

A new patient mysteriously appears in a psychiatric ward. He claims to come from another planet to study humans and their behavior. The alien is gentle but criticizes humans for their harsh treatment of each other. The assigned psychiatrist is himself unhappy, and affected by the patient's insight. But he is ordered to treat the patient according to institutional procedure.

Dr. Tremayne is an enigmatic psychiatrist running an asylum that houses four very special cases. Visited by his colleague Nicholas, Tremayne explains his amazing and controversial theories as to why each of the four patients went mad.

Mrs. Van Houten has shown signs of losing touch with reality, and her husband discusses possible treatment with Dr. Caligari, who says Mrs. Van Houten has a disease of the libido.

A naive young man witnesses an escalation of violence in his small hometown following the arrival of a mysterious circus attraction.

A farmer's wife is seduced into running away from her stolid older husband by a city slicker, who enslaves her in a brothel.

An assistant prosecutor zealously pursues a conviction in the case of a pediatric nurse accused of murdering her patients, but doubt arises when her evidence shows that the infants may have died of natural causes.

One day a mysterious box arrived and a curse began to spread all over. The source of the box is 'Jukai Village'. The village is hidden in Jukai Forest, a suicide spot that once you enter it, you can never come out.

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

When a number of suicide victims slash themselves in their sleep, detective Keiko Kirishima is called to investigate.

A grieving doctor is being contacted by his late wife through his patient's near death experiences.

In Victorian England, two grave robbers supply a wealthy doctor with bodies to research anatomy on, but greed causes them to look for a more simple way to get the job done.

A fourth-grader investigates the mysterious reason behind the sudden appearance of penguins in his village, which is somehow related to a power from a young woman working at a dental clinic.

When a theater troupe's master visits his old flame, he unintentionally sets off a chain of unexpected events with devastating consequences.

While treating a policewoman for smoking, hypnotherapist Michael Strother has a telepathic vision of a young girl floating beneath the surface of a stream. The escaped victim of a ritualistic serial killer, the girl has become mute, and Michael is called upon by Scotland Yard to unlock the secrets she holds in order to catch a man who believes he has discovered the key to immortality.

A gentle, war-shattered ex-soldier, Kinji Kameda, arrives in wintry Hokkaidō and is pulled into a volatile tangle of love and pity between the disgraced Taeko Nasu, the proud Ayako, and his possessive friend Akama. Kameda’s saintly compassion exposes everyone’s wounds, steering the quartet toward jealousy, violence, and inexorable tragedy. Adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel.

Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment - even a wife. But before long, Andreas notices that something is wrong. Andreas makes an attempt to escape the city, but he discovers there's no way out. Andreas meets Hugo, who has found a crack in a wall in his cellar. Beautiful music streams out from the crack. Maybe it leads to "the other side"? A new plan for escape is hatched.

Comedy about the flawed Italian healthcare system of the time and a doctor's expeirence with it.

A homeless man meets a medical school student who pays him to volunteer for a surgical procedure known as trepanation, drilling a hole in his skull, which ends up giving him the ability to communicate with the dark side of people’s subconscious minds.

The erotic novelist Taeko is writing a morbid story of a family destroyed by incest, murder and abuse. Her assistant, Yuji, sets on a mission to uncover the reality of this story, but the reality might be too much to bear.

In rural Japan, the survivors of a tragedy converge and attempt to overcome their damaged selves, all while a serial killer is on the loose.

While returning to Leningrad from a visit to his brother, Professor Artyom's car breaks down and he finds assistance at an isolated farmhouse occupied by Alexey, his wife, a Vietnamese laborer, and a stranger who wanders around the farm. When his car is repaired, Artyom leaves, drunk on moonshine, and students Valera and Angelika arrive. After Valera gets drunk, the stranger abducts Angelika.

1975. When Seyolo Zantoko, a doctor from the Congo who has managed, along with his family, to flee tyranny, is hired by the mayor of a small town in northern France, he begins a struggle to adapt to a new life and gain the trust of the prejudiced villagers.
