A new, restored version of Orson Welles’s 1963 film The Trial has been released. It is playing in a few select theaters before being released on home video and streaming .

The Trial is based on the novel by Franz Kafka, which tells the story of a man, Josef K., who is charged with a crime by a menacing and labyrinth bureaucracy that refuses to tell him what that crime is. The book introduced the world to the phrase “Kafkaesque,” meaning a nightmare world where people can be locked up and destroyed by a nameless, faceless, and byzantine government without ever knowing what they did.

The new version of The Trial is astonishingly relevant. In one of the film’s best scenes, Josef goes to see a painter in the hopes that the artist, who does portraits of powerful judges, can help his case. Josef notices that one of the paintings depicts Lady Justice, usually blindfolded and with scales balanced in one hand, with no base and with wings on her feet. Lady Justice has now become Artemis, goddess of the hunt.

It’s a powerful metaphor for the problems in so much of our justice system, our punitive social justice culture, and a media that hunt prey down rather than working to uncover all the facts calmly. Take, for example, the potential indictment of former President Donald Trump for allegedly paying hush money to bury an affair. The charges have the media and the Manhattan district attorney making a case that elevates a campaign misdemeanor into a federal crime. Whatever you think of Trump — and I have always been ambivalent — the convoluted case against him, with its byzantine details, seems like a put-up job out of Kafka. The only thing more confusing than this case is the Steele dossier, the garbage opposition research package that was used to impeach Trump even though everyone involved with it knew it was based on bad sources and rabbit holes.

In my own personal experience, the parallels to Kafka have been stark and literal. In September 2018, I was sitting at home reading when I got a call from Ronan Farrow, a writer for the New Yorker. Farrow informed me that I had been named in a letter accusing my high school friend Brett Kavanaugh of “sexual misconduct” in the 1980s. Brett had been nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. Farrow could not tell me who the accuser was or where the misconduct allegedly happened.

At the time, popular blogger Allahpundit described the situation well: “Judge apparently found out he was named in [Ford’s] letter when Ronan Farrow called to ask about it. Farrow offered no details about when the incident supposedly happened or where, or even the name of the woman. Judge has been accused of participating in an attempted rape with a would-be Supreme Court justice, in other words, and can’t even get the basic facts of the allegation provided to him. It’s Kafkaesque.”

After a monstrous two-week delay, in which my life was turned upside down, Brett was confirmed to the bench. There have been depictions of what happened in the popular culture, from Saturday Night Live to novels and movies, but nothing has come close to the fantastical and terrifying reality as well as Welles’s 1963 movie. The opening sequence in which Josef K. is interrogated by government agents, who proceed to twist everything he says into a fiction, is identical to how the media turned me into an enemy of all decency.

In his book We’ve Got People, journalist Ryan Grim described how reporters themselves helped to create the stories they then reported on. “Oftentimes reporters are the mosquitoes that carry the rumor from office to office in attempts to confirm it,” Grim wrote.

On Sept. 12, Grim published a story in The Intercept that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) was having an argument with Senate colleagues about a letter a woman named Christine Blasey Ford had sent to Feinstein describing an alleged sexual assault in high school at the hands of Brett Kavanaugh. Just as FBI Director James Comey had used a “debriefing” with Trump to leak the Russian dossier story to the media, reporters created the very story that they then reported on.

Grim observed that reporters were “mosquitoes,” carrying the news of Ford’s letter to senators on Capitol Hill to get a reaction. In other words, they created the story they would then break. Grim admitted as much: “Whether the allegations in [Ford’s] letter were true or not — or, indeed, what the precise allegations were — was its own story, and I didn’t have it. But the fact that Feinstein was battling with fellow Democrats on the committee over the issue was a separate story. And that one I had.”

Yes — because the Feinstein conflict had been manufactured by the “mosquitoes” in the media itself.

The Trial uses surrealism, Brutalist sets, and nightmarish camera angles to create a world without sense, logic, or mercy. Josef K.’s lawyer, called the Advocate and played by Welles, is an indolent emperor who lays in bed all day smoking cigars and being tended to by a mistress. Court judges use hand signals to get hostile gallery crowds to react in a certain way (just as senators during Brett’s nomination hearings knew about the protesters in the gallery.) Welles’s images, as one reviewer put it, “burst through the screen to evoke an oppressively incomprehensible system of edicts and constraints.”

In one scene, a woman asks Josef K., ”How do you know you were accused?" He responded that "they woke me up and told me." To which she replies, "Are you sure you were awake?”

I know I was. Although, it’s nightmare I’ll never forget.

Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of  The Devil' s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.