“To be in chains is sometimes safer than to be free.” If the thematic hallmark of film noir is alienation, then Orson Welles’s heady, creepy Le procès (US: The Trial) could be the apogee of the noir cycle. Based on Franz Kafka’s existentialist novel published in 1925, The Trial fuses a cerebral, irrational story with explosive visual expressionism to create a cinematic marvel that is both anxiety-producing and awe-inspiring. Still riding high from his breakout performance in Psycho (1960), Anthony Perkins plays Josef K, an anonymous man who wakes up in an anonymous city to find policemen waiting to arrest him for a crime that will never be disclosed but for which his lawyer (Orson Welles) will later advise him to plead guilty by reason of insanity. Viewers are advised, however, to temper expectations for narrative and character development; instead, just enjoy the dream-like experience of the film, which seduces visually, scene by scene: a disabled woman hauling a trunk through a vast wasteland, zombie-like people standing open-mouthed in a courtyard, lovemaking in a pit of books during a thunderstorm, children aggressively giggling and peeking through cracks at an artist in his studio, an atomic-level explosion in a quarry. The spectacular art direction by Jean Mandaroux is superb: savor the lawyer’s candelabra-strewn apartment, the endless ocean of cubicles with adding machines humming. And the omnipresent refrain of Tomaso Albinoni’s “Adagio in G minor” adds a weird but welcome consistency.