Movies like The Trial (1975)
The best movies like The Trial (1975) are The Grandmother (1970), Eraserhead (1977) and Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971). If The Trial hooked you, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedThe Trial (1962)7.4/10 from 597 votes
- NewestMeurtre du tableau (2025)Released 2025
- In JapaneseThrow Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)Also in Japanese
The Grandmother (1970)
To escape neglect and abuse from his parents, a young boy plants some strange seeds and they grow into a grandmother.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisEraserhead (1977)
First-time father Henry Spencer tries to survive his industrial environment, his angry girlfriend, and the unbearable screams of his newly born mutant child.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThrow Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971)
An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRabbits (2002)
A story of a group of humanoid rabbits and their depressive, daily life. The plot includes Suzie ironing, Jane sitting on a couch, Jack walking in and out of the apartment, and the occasional solo singing number by Suzie or Jane. At one point the rabbits also make contact with their “leader”.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisToo Many Cooks (2014)
"Too Many Cooks" is a humorous parody of US sitcoms of the 1970s and the 1980s, meanwhile what seems like an interminable opening theme, a mysterious killer makes his way and kills (preparing a lunch with their limbs) various members of the Cook Family.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPastoral: To Die in the Country (1974)
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.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSucker Punch (2011)
A young woman, institutionalized by her abusive stepfather, retreats into a vivid fantasy world where she envisions a plan to escape. Gathering a group of fellow inmates, she embarks on a quest to collect five mystical items, blurring the lines between reality and imagination.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Zero Theorem (2013)
A computer hacker's goal to discover the reason for human existence continually finds his work interrupted thanks to the Management; this time, they send a teenager and lusty love interest to distract him.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisDolls (1987)
A precocious girl, her nasty parents, two punk-rock losers and a weak-kneed salesman inadvertently become the guests of two ghoulish senior citizens in their dark, haunted mansion.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisRubber's Lover (1996)
After the explosive demise of their last subject, scientists must look for a replacement on whom to continue their bizarre experiments with brain-altering drugs.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisMr. K (2025)
Mr. K, a traveling magician, finds himself in a Kafkaesque nightmare when he can’t find the exit of his hotel. His attempts to get out only pull him deeper, entangling him further with the hotel and its curious inhabitants.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Trial (1962)
Arrested for an unnamed crime, Josef K. is trapped in a surreal bureaucratic maze where justice is unknowable and guilt is assumed.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSociety (1990)
Bill Whitney is worried that he is different to his sister and parents. They mix with other upper-class people while Bill is more down to earth. Even his girlfriend seems a bit odd. All is revealed when Bill returns home to find a party in full swing.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisManiac (2012)
As he helps a young artist with her upcoming exhibition, the owner of a mannequin shop's deadly, suppressed desires come to the surface.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Cowboy and the Frenchman (1988)
A grizzled, hard-of-hearing cowboy, Slim, and his two friends, Dusty and Pete, capture a mysterious, well-dressed Frenchman.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisBoys in the Trees (2016)
On Halloween 1997, two estranged teen skaters embark on a surreal journey through their memories, dreams and fears.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisNowhere (1997)
In Los Angeles, a colorful assortment of bohemians try to make sense of their intersecting lives. The moody Dark Smith, his bisexual girlfriend, her lesbian lover and their shy gay friend plan on attending the wildest party of the year. But they'll only make it if they can survive the drug trips, suicides, trysts, mutilations and alien abductions that occur as one surreal day unfolds.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisLove & Pop (1998)
Tokyo schoolgirl Hiromi and her friends engage in a practice known as enjo kosai, or "compensated dating", where older men pay young girls for dates. Hiromi plunges deeper into this world to raise money for an expensive ring.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisBeau Is Afraid (2023)
Following the sudden death of his mother, a mild-mannered but anxiety-ridden man confronts his darkest fears as he embarks on an epic odyssey back home.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisTetsuo: The Iron Man (1989)
A "metal fetishist", driven mad by the maggots wriggling in the wound he's made to embed metal into his flesh, runs out into the night and is accidentally run down by a Japanese businessman and his girlfriend. The pair dispose of the corpse in hopes of quietly moving on with their lives. However, the businessman soon finds that he is now plagued by a vicious curse that transforms his flesh into iron.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers
Worth the HypeMovies like thisMeurtre du tableau (2025)
An artist, surrounded by the mess in her studio, struggles with frustration as she tries to find inspiration for her new painting.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Land Without Bread (1933)
An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSoliloquy (1967)
Featuring Joan Adler (who also appears in Chinese Checkers), Soliloquy is one of the four early Stephen Dwoskin films that were awarded the Solvey prize at the EXPRMNTL festival in Knokke, Belgium in 1967. “In Soliloquy a girl broods uncertainly over a failed love affair, while the camera roves over her fingers, her cigarette, her knuckles, her lips and the hand mirror in which she peers. In its dark reflection one isolated eye seems a dead thing, twitching; the split between her body and her spoken thoughts becomes a strange bilocation of consciousness; towards the end, an aeroplane drones overhead” (Raymond Durgnat)
Why it matches: Similar story and style
C-Film (1970)
Two women in a living room: smoking, playing cards, listening to the radio. As often in Dwoskin’s films, the use of masks, make-up and costumes allows the characters to playfully transform themselves. Shot in colour film, C-film exuberates swinging London energy. In the second part of the film, the women appear to be watching the rushes of the film on an editing table. ”We are making a movie” we hear them say. As Dwoskin points out, “C-film asks how much is acting acted”, an ongoing question in Dwoskin’s cinema. Produced by Alan Power, with Esther Anderson & Sally Geeson.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Jesus Blood (1972)
A man walks towards the camera down the end of a street to the sound of 'Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet', a composition by Gavin Bryars based on a loop of an anonymous homeless man singing the song. The man’s voice is progressively intensified by an instrumental accompaniment, which increases in density and richness, before the whole thing gradually fades out. Dwoskin’s film was produced to be shown during the premiere of Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London in December 1972. For Dwoskin, it represents “… the singing voice of the last days of a London drunk (anonymous) as the orchestra raises him to heaven. The faint ghost image of a figure swims gradually to you through the grains of film low light…”
Why it matches: Similar story and style
I Am Making Art (1971)
In an ironic reference to body art, process art and performance, Baldessari challenges definitions of the content and execution of art-making. Performing with deadpan precision, he moves his hands, arms and entire body in studied, minute motions, intoning the phrase "I am making art" with each gesture. Each articulation of the phrase is given a different emphasis and nuance, as if art were being created from moment to moment. This index of body movements is ironically offset by the repetitive monotony of the exercise.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Mira corpora (2004)
The film appears like a ritual with splendids and crypteds psalms. The Great Master of Order (Marcel Mazé, new fetish actor after Aloual) seduces the young male prey with a running cinema projector which carves Murnau's Nosferatu extracts on their bodies. Metamorphosis, rituals passages, Eros and Thanotos, illusion and reality, film into the film are the themes and images in perpetual osmosis in this Stéphane Marti's opus.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Playtime (2013)
Playtime’s cosmopolitan spectacle, presented in a kaleidoscopic montage across seven large screens, interconnects the lives of its archetypical characters—hedge fund managers and art world players in London; a photographer in Reykjavik; and a Filipina houseworker in Dubai—each of whom is based on a real-life individual directly affected by the market collapse.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
The Passion of Anna (1969)
A recently divorced man and an emotionally devastated widow begin a love affair.
Why it matches: Similar story and style
Worth the HypeMovies like this
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like The Trial?
The closest matches to The Trial are The Grandmother (1970), Eraserhead (1977) and Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after The Trial?
Start with The Grandmother (1970), the closest match to The Trial.
What is the highest-rated movie like The Trial?
The Trial (1962), rated 7.4/10 by 597 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like The Trial?
Meurtre du tableau (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
Are there Japanese movies like The Trial?
Yes: Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1971), Pastoral: To Die in the Country (1974) and Rubber's Lover (1996).
How are movies similar to The Trial chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside The Trial, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.