Director: Victor Sjostrom
Year: 1921
Country: Sweden
Language: Swedish
I first saw Swedish Director Victor Sjostrom's silent classic The Phantom Carriage on TCM (Turner Classic Movies) exactly a year ago around 3am. I found myself so entranced with this film that I bought the Criterion Collection Special Edition just a few weeks later. It is a spellbinding film based on Nobel laureate Selma Lagerlöf's original 1912 novel Thy Soul Shall Bare Witness. The film is so shrouded with a grim and moody atmosphere that it is often thought of as a horror tale, indeed many of the elements that consist within this film could be considered "horror" but it is more of an intense Dickensian morality tale.
The Phantom Carriage is set on a rather melancholy New Years Eve. Edit (Astrid Holm), a sister of the Salvation Army who is dying of tuberculosis, asks her mother (Concordia Selander) and her colleague Maria (Lisa Lundholm) to find David Holm (Victor Sjostrom) so he could visit her on her deathbed. David is in the cemetery with two other drunks, recounting the legend of The Phantom Carriage.The legend goes that the last sinner to die on New Years Eve becomes Death, a doomed soul collector. David refuses to see Edit and he dies shortly after. The coachman arrives, it is one of his friends who died the year before. The friend helps David revisit his past and through flashbacks shows how greedy and selfish he was.
While it is clear that Phantom Carriage may have been inspired by Charles Dicken's A Christmas Carol, Phantom Carriage's influence spreads far and wide as well. It inspired the universally known Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman and his most critically acclaimed film The Seventh Seal. In time Ingmar Bergman influenced filmmakers like Woody Allen who influenced plenty of other people himself. In some way you could you could probably link this film to Seinfeld. It certainly is responsible for the most famous scene in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Jack Nicholson's "Here's Johnny!" scene is an homage to a scene in The Phantom Carriage, minus the dialouge of course.
Phantom Carriage was made in simple, but extremely time-consuming and very precise series of double exposures. The filmmaker, his photographer and a lab manager created the ghostly three dimensional illusion that was inventive and innovative. It was beyond anything anybody had previously seen in the wide world of Cinema. The complex narration that consisted of a series of flashbacks, and flashbacks within flashbacks was on the cutting edge of poetic excellence. The two scores on the Criterion Collection edition of this film are quite excellent and definitely add to the dark decaying mood of this film. You can't go wrong with either the Matti Bye score or the experimental score by KTL.
In conclusion, though the small religious aspect of the film may not fair well with a more secular North American audience, The Phantom Carriage is a rare cinematic treat. Once you see the film you will never forget it. The intense images of dread and doom will be stuck in your mind for years to come. It is a great self reflective piece of art, perhaps after you watch this film you will re-examine your life and decide to be a better, less selfish, person. This also has one of the most dramatic endings that I have seen in film. Praise it! 5/5
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