For his feature film debut the director took on an extremely challenging assignment – to transfer one of Franz Kafka’s novels to the big screen. He settled on the early prose work The Man Who Disappeared, which nevertheless already contains all of the author’s key motifs, primarily the angst-ridden, solitary hero, and the surrounding reality as a labyrinth full of absurd situations and incomprehensible demands. In order to evoke the protagonist’s grievous states and the perils of his estranged world, Michálek made inventive use of expressionist film idioms: copious details of faces and gestures, scenes with no backdrop, steeped in chiaroscuro, and a score brimming with dissonance. The sets depicting the American urban landscape are markedly reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.