Opinion on Doctor Glas (1905) and related work
- Adaptation: Doctor Glas (2026)
Doctor Glas (1905
)
Hjalmar Söderberg (writer).
‣ Doctor Glas (2026
)
Seen in 2026.
Glas works at a private clinic. Helga’s husband is not a pastor but a celebrity.
This is the fourth adaptation of Söderberg’s novel to film. In the third-to-last paragraph of the original, Glas writes in his diary about getting new curtains, whereas in this particular adaptation, curtains have not been invented. Crucial events in private spaces are on display to the public, because the theme here is not justice or the moral outrage that Söderberg provoked. The theme is scopophilia.
The script is tightly compressed in its chronology, using both prolepsis and catalepsis to hold the viewer’s hand through a simplified story. To keep the film extremely light, Patrik Gregorius is not a figure of authority, but a person so vacuous and confrontational that he couldn’t have been murdered too soon. When Glas finally does kill him, it’s with fentanyl at a lavish costume party in the style of “The Masque of the Red Death” (1842) but with more cocaine.
Söderberg’s Stockholm is cut. Instead, there’s an off-hand reference to the British celebrity/reality TV show Love Island (2005). I think that reference points to the heart of this adaptation. The film’s scopophilia owes more to reality-style soap opera than its mindless spectacle does to video produced for 2026’s short attention spans. Accordingly, Glas is reduced to a stalker, obsessively following Helga both online and in real life. The only contrary impulse is to give Helga herself the final world, taking a feminist stance against Glas’s interference. That concluding confrontation, showing none of the trust in the viewer that Söderberg had in his readers, is as redundant as the film itself.