The Doll – Paweł Maślona | #film

The Doll – Paweł Maślona

Netflix’s adaptation of ‘The Doll’ impresses with the sheer cheek its makers have shown the original novel. Superbly acted and visually striking, this 6-part limited series is a thoroughly contemporary story. And though it occasionally loses dramatic momentum, it holds its own through scale and swagger.

Even before the series reached anybody’s TV screen, the trailers had set off a wave of outraged comments. A chorus of voices cried out ‘There were no sex scenes in Bolesław Prus’s original!’ and ‘But nobody swore in the book!’, with the Cassandra-like laments usually ending with ‘When did we get so coarse?’ and diatribes about all the classics we’ve vulgarised. Now it’s finally here, the premiere has only amplified that criticism.

But let’s set aside the ritual grumbling about the superiority of originals, and even the comparison’s with Wojciech Jerzy Has’s 1968 film and Ryszard Ber’s 1977 TV version. Paweł Maślona has made something that is very much his own. And yes it’s true that in Prus’s book the characters didn’t swear and didn’t have sex – in Maślona’s version, they swear, they have sex, and there are dozens of plot changes, thanks to which the director of Scarborn has created a thoroughly contemporary series, one seeking to connect with a 21st-century audience. You can reject that vision if you like, but I guarantee that confronting it is the more interesting challenge.

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The Doll | Official Trailer | Netflix

The Doll needs to be thought of as a series merely inspired by Prus, not as a video illustration of him. So what is it then? Bold – thematically, stylistically, and in its casting. Maślona has sketched a story here about insurmountable class divisions and a system that cannot be beaten. It could hardly have been otherwise, given that the writers, alongside the director himself and Jagoda Dutkiewicz, include Paweł Demirski, a playwright who has returned to the theme obsessively throughout his career. It’s no wonder that the series time and again resembles The White Lotus in 19th-century costume more than it does a classic tale of unrequited love.

Maślona makes several radical gestures. He sets mirrors before his characters, constructing this version of Wokulski and Izabela as each other’s opposites and, at the same time, as people who resemble each other like twins.

Following the novel, he draws Wokulski as an ambitious pariah who has undeniably achieved success and made a great fortune in the war, but is still left incapable of breaking through the glass ceiling of class. Driven by his desire to transcend it, he sees marriage to Izabela as the culmination of his journey. But this version of Izabela Łęcka is driven by an impossible desire too. Maślona and his co-writers have introduced a new plot about Eliza Orzeszkowa (Agnieszka Grochowska) and the magazine Bluszcz (Ivy), which Izabela wants to write for. In Maślona’s hands, this porcelain doll – whom some would keep behind a shop window and others would treat as a financial asset for extracting money from a lovestruck merchant – turns out to be an ambitious woman sympathetic to the emancipation movement. And she also has to face rejection: to liberated intellectual women, she is merely an empty aristocrat who knows nothing of life and is endowed with very limited literary talents.

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Sandra Drzymalska & Tomasz Schuchardt in the series 'The Doll' directed by Pawał Maślona, 2026, photo: Robert Pałka / Netflix

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By reversing the characters’ vectors in this way, Maślona opens up a very interesting perspective on them. He shows Izabela and Wokulski as people with twin experiences – both humiliated and rejected. As a result, they (she especially) become far more human. And they seem made for each other, as if each were the answer to the other’s needs and desires. This makes the impossibility of their meeting all the more tragic: internal and external blocks prevent Izabela from stepping outside her social role.

These aren’t the only bold decisions taken by Prus’s adaptors. The series’ writers turn the Warsaw merchant into… a stalker, who besieges the woman he loves with his toxic feelings. He deliberately builds a web of dependencies around her and tries to make her reliant on him, pushing Izabela into accepting his advances. It would probably be a recipe for certain disaster were it not for actor Tomasz Schuchardt, who stands up for his character even when he commits transgressions that, from today’s point of view, would have been insurmountable red flags.

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Sandra Drzymalska & Tomasz Schuchardt in the series 'The Doll' directed by Pawał Maślona, 2026, photo: Robert Pałka / Netflix

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Schuchardt and his co-star Sandra Drzymalska are the heart of the series. He can be a fragile boy who moves awkwardly when attending aristocratic salons, but he’s also a ruthless cynic scrupulously executing his plan to ensnare Izabela. She, in turn, sometimes appears as a silly and giddy featherbrain, but in reality conceals a need to free herself from the constraints imposed by class and gender. In Drzymalska’s interpretation, Izabela becomes a tragic figure – trapped between personal ambition and family duty, she is the titular doll who, against everything, refuses to consent to being turned into an object.

Whereas in Maciej Kawalski’s new film version, it’s the bourgeois-aristocratic arena that catches the eye (for now, I can’t say anything more), the Netflix series lives thanks to its two leads. That doesn’t mean the other actors fade into the background – far from it. Especially fine are Piotr Pacek as Starski, who is ironic, charming and enormously intelligent, and Piotr Adamczyk as Baron Krzeszowski, a moth-eaten aristocrat pathetically parading the remnants of a greatness that was never quite his. Bold choices too are Dariusz Chojnacki as a Rzecki nowhere near as old as the original, Maria Kania as the ‘chav’ maid Marianna, and Jacek Braciak, teetering on the edge of overacting, as Tomasz Łęcki, living in a haze of vodka and the hope that their lives will soon improve again. All of them – Julia Wyszyńska, and Henryk Niebudek as Prince Rudnicki included – are clearly having a ball in their roles, and the striking set design and costumes visibly give them wings.

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Magdalena Cielecka & Sandra Drzymalska in the series 'The Doll' directed by Pawał Maślona, 2026, photo: Robert Pałka / Netflix

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This doesn’t mean Maślona’s The Doll is free of flaws. They don’t stem from its infidelity to Prus, nor even from its ostentatious modernisation of the story. The weakness is the drama itself. The series simply doesn’t keep up the pace it requires. The director meets the needs of today’s viewer by sharpening the conflicts (Wokulski as stalker, Izabela as a praying mantis knowingly destroying her suitor), but it just isn’t enough to evenly fill six hour-long episodes. And since the makers consciously drop some of the novel’s subplots (starting with the antisemitic thread and the shop assistant Mraczewski) to focus on the relationship between Wokulski and Izabela, their story sometimes slows down, and the stakes the characters are playing for don’t always seem high enough to sustain the required tension over such a long stretch.

Despite all this, Netflix’s The Doll remains one of the most interesting television events of recent years. Made on a grand scale and boldly staged, it shows that the classics don’t have to be approached on bended knee, and that rewriting them – risky as it may be – can be enormously inspiring. And although Paweł Maślona’s radical vision will be impossible to swallow for some viewers, it fits perfectly with the creative philosophy of a director who already showed in 2023’s Scarborn that he has no intention of bowing to grand history and its monuments. Not even Bolesław Prus’s.

‘The Doll’, directed by Paweł Maślona. Script: Paweł Demirski, Jagoda Dutkiewicz, Paweł Maślona. Cinematography: Paweł Flis. Production design: Joanna Macha. Costumes: Dorota Roqueplo. Music: Baasch. Starring: Tomasz Schuchardt, Sandra Drzymalska, Jacek Braciak, Dariusz Chojnacki, Piotr Adamczyk, Piotr Pacek, Agnieszka Grochowska. Premiere: 16.09.2026.

adaptation

The Doll

Bolesław Prus (Aleksander Głowacki)