NIGHTMARE BUREAUCRACIES

And you thought the TVA was bad…

THE TRIAL 1962

Anthony Perkins plays unassuming office worker Joseph K. in Orson Welles’ dizzying adaptation of Kafka’s famous novel. Arrested in his bedroom, he’s charged with an unstated crime and repeatedly hits dead ends as he tries to clear his name, or even just find out what the hell’s going on. His sentence? Death.

1984 1984

Big Brother is watching Winston Smith (John Hurt) as he dares to taste love and strawberry jam in a crushingly bleak, totalitarian future-world. This film version by Michael Radford is far superior to the 1954 incarnation, its every desaturated, junkyard frame capturing the bleakness and anger of George Orwell’s book.

BRAZIL 1985

Our hero Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) is a low-ranking bureaucrat working in the oppressive Ministry of Information, in a dystopian world of technocracy, hyper-surveillance and state capitalism. No wonder he daydreams of flying high above it all and saving a beautiful damsel. Alas, there is no way out.

THE DOUBLE 2013

Setting Dostoyevsky’s novella in a land of office bureaucracy, Richard Ayoade casts Jesse Eisenberg as Simon James, belittled by colleagues and ignored by work crush Hannah (Mia Wasikowska). Then arrives doppelgänger James Simon to impress the boss and date Hannah. Perfectly captures feeling like a small cog in a big machine.

SOUL 2020

Strange to pick a work of such vaulting imagination, perhaps, but The Great Before is something of a bureaucratic nightmare, with everything having to be done just so. No wonder Joe (Jamie Foxx) wants to escape back to Earth… no easy task when those abstract characters are there to foil his attempts.