About an hour into this beautifully photographed monochrome non-biopic, a door opens on the clerical hell of the mysterious hill-top castle revealing a world of arresting, almost lurid colour; a happy-land of brutal laboratories reminiscent of Hammer's Frankenstein years. Surrealism edges into the red with white-coated doctors, exposed operations, and in a gloriously realised scene, a brain and eyeball revealed in terrible detail as Kafka is pursued across the colossal focusing-dome of a leviathan microscope.

Lem Dobbs' great lost script may have appeared a perverse choice for Steven Soderbergh to follow his realist Palme D'Or winner sex, lies & videotape. That the result brilliantly eluded both US critics and box-office alike (gathering dust here until now) should leave no one in any doubt.

Prague 1919. Mild-mannered wageslave by day, aspirant author by night, the apparent suicide of a friend after visiting the Technicolor castle pitches Kafka (Jeremy Irons) into the shadowy world of an anarchist underground. The subsequent disappearance of enigmatic radical Gabriela (Theresa Russell), murder of her co-conspirators, and attempt on his own life, leave Kafka no option but to visit the castle himself - with the anarchists' bomb.

Sharing much in common with the brief but honourable tradition of filmed-writers (the Coens' phenomenal Barton Fink, Burroughs adaptation Naked Lunch), the obvious reference here is Wim Wenders' marvellous Hammett (1982), with its eponymous author effectively pitched into a plot divined of their own art.

Still, off-loading your crew to Eastern Europe is no guarantee of securing that illusive Kafkaesque quality - evidence the ingratiatingly dull Pinter-scripted adaptation of The Trial only last year. Fortunately, Soderbergh favours fun over academic slavery: Kafka works the Orlac account, meets a Dr. Murnau; the office and Escher-like castle owe to Terry Gilliam's own oft-quoted Kafka-nightmare Brazil; and Walt Lloyd's cinematography resurrects both horror classics and German Expressionism. (One is reminded of Woody Allen's recent, less successful Shadows and Fog).

Casting is less showy, more appealing than The Trial: Irons, ever watchable, is a perfectly still centre; key player in both the Cronenberg and Gilliam pictures, Ian Holm is excellent; and able support comes from Alec Guinness, Brian Glover and Joren Krabbe's revolutionary "stone-carver". Less sure, the excellent Russell is criminally under-used; and Simon McBurney and Keith Allen's vigorous slapstick seems desperately inappropriate.

But even first-rate elements like Cliff Martinez's atmospheric score and a stunning title sequence cannot prevent the film from being somehow less than the most effective sum of its parts. A little too rich, too obstinate, Kafka shoots for and misses the same forbidding inevitability that drives the synthesis of creator and created in those other movies, but remains rather endearing for all that. Flawed certainly, but not lacking in ambition.