The Cinematheque

“A superb and sensitive film … Zetterling, dealing with the darkest of passions, has achieved a lyricism of tone and a throbbing humanism that will not leave you untouched.”

Judith Crist, New York Magazine

Adapted from Hjalmar Söderberg’s acclaimed novel, which projects a moral dilemma into the secret pages of a physician’s diary, Doktor Glas is Mai Zetterling’s most stylistically controlled film and a subtle masterwork about the neuroses of domineering men. Both Glas (Per Oscarsson) and Reverend Gregorius (Ulf Palme, Miss Julie) are men used to exercising a god-like power in Stockholm. The mannered faces which they turn to the world are quickly unmasked in Zetterling’s treatment. Glas, led with equal parts sympathy and desire, breaks from his conservative medical practice when the reverend’s wife requests his aid: a cure to her husband’s violent ​“use of God for his own interest and for fulfilling his own wishes,” against her refusal of sex. Zetterling fragments the narrative with a myopic present-tense, overexposed dream scenes, and haunted voiceover. The director gets inside Glas’s head, and also movingly conveys the psychological cost and tension of Mrs. Gregorius’s everyday life.

In Swedish and Danish with English subtitles

Advisory: Doktor Glas includes a scene of sexual violence.

DCP courtesy Nordisk Film Production A/S

“[Though] they flopped massively upon release, Doktor Glas and The Girls, made back-to-back, are Zetterling’s two best films.”

Alex Barrett, BFI

“Doktor Glas is the story of a man’s struggle with himself—a struggle against those parts of himself which he hates. Most thinking people today are more or less in the same situation as Glas. Their work gives them no satisfaction, they are almost obsessed by the thought that they have certain inhibitions that they cannot properly explain—and they are lonely.”

Mai Zetterling