One night in deep midwinter, K. arrives at an inn in a snow-covered village beneath a mighty castle which may or may not exist. K., played by Tetsushi Tanaka, claims he has been hired by the castle as a land surveyor.

In the six strange days that follow, K. is constantly confused by quirky and contradictory phone calls and notes from the castle that keep him in limbo, while no one from the castle ever comes to meet him. All his efforts to reach it fail as he repeatedly loses his way in the snow and ends up back in the village. His life is rendered meaningless by this control from on high, a control that encompasses all life in the village. A further inscrutable irony is that K. never even sets eyes on the mist-shrouded castle itself.

Directed and created by Osamu Matsumoto, "The Castle" is based on the unfinished novel by Franz Kafka (1883-1924), written in 1922, two years before his death from tuberculosis.