The Phantom Carriage (1921)

directed by Victor Sjöström

Sweden

107 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I watched this as my pick for a New Year's Eve-appropriate horror movie (you can only watch New Year's Evil so many times), but I would encourage anybody to watch this at any time of year. I highly recommend tracking down the Criterion edition for the cleanest picture quality possible and also watching it with the accompanying contemporary soundtrack by Matti Bye - this is the version I watched, upon general internet consensus that it was the most appropriate to the film, even though as a Sunn O))) fan I would have gravitated towards the KTL soundtrack. You could arguably watch this with no soundtrack at all, in silence, but I would advise against that since, even though this is a silent film, even at its earliest showings it would have been presented with some kind of soundtrack.

The film opens with a woman, a worker at a Christian charity for the poor and homeless, lying sick in bed while her mother and a fellow charity worker attend to her. Through intertitles we're told that she doesn't have much time left. She knows this herself and begins desperately calling for someone named David Holm, which obviously upsets the people with her, although we don't yet know why. The sister at her bedside leaves to search for Holm, but with no luck, though she does find his wife, herself destitute and in rags. After a little while we are then presented with a group of three drunk men sitting in a graveyard together, waiting for the clock to strike midnight. One of them tells the others a story that will become the basis for the rest of the film and the meaning behind the title.

The man recounts how he used to have a friend, somewhat older than him and the rest of his peer group, who was educated at Uppsala and therefore regarded as a kind of authority on various things and a more mature presence among him and his friends; a generally upbeat and jovial personality who, every year, underwent a total change on New Year's Eve. Witnessing a careless bar brawl between our narrator and some other friends, he breaks up the fight and entreats them to be more careful, since according to him, whoever dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve becomes Death for the rest of the year, forced to drive his carriage and see to the reaping of freshly deceased souls. In a cinematic twist, we're told that this man's fears came true the year before, and he has been carrying out Death's duties ever since.

The film then goes into a sequence of showing us Death going about his work which is singularly one of the most striking things I've seen from the silent era. Death and his carriage are filmed using the double-exposure technique, so they float over the screen, half-transparent and ghostly. Incorporeal, they are able to tread over water and walk under the sea to retrieve the soul of one who has died by drowning. Death's first visit is to an unnamed man who commits suicide; I was very surprised by this because, while nothing remotely bloody is shown, I did not expect to see a film this early show someone committing suicide by handgun. It just feels incongruous with the time period - not suicide itself, but that specific method. As we'll see, this is an incredibly dark and somber film that does not at all shy away from topics of suicide, murder, addiction, sickness, and, of course, the master of them all, death. It's worth noting that this film was immediately banned by the Swedish film board at the time, but left intact and uncensored for reasons I'm not entirely clear on, but am thankful for.

Back in the present day, a police officer encounters the group of men in the graveyard and we find out that the teller of this story is none other than the David Holm the sick woman has been asking for. He refuses to move, which leads to another pointless scuffle that ultimately ends with Holm's death - right at the stroke of midnight. His soul separates from his body, and soon who else comes to collect him but his old friend, in robes, carrying a scythe. At first he believes himself to simply by injured and begs his friend to take him to the hospital in his carriage, but his friend cannot. "You know very well I am no longer among the living," he says. There's something interesting here about the portrayal of recently-deceased souls, that double-exposure technique used again to show them lifting out of their earthly bodies and becoming inhabitants of an in-between space. Still themselves, with all of their memories, but now lacking a physical form. From here on this film becomes a Christmas Carol-esque exploration of exactly where and how Holm's life went down a dark path that led to him, drunk and alone on New Year's, dying a sad death after a life of regret.

Now, I watched this as a horror movie, but the tone and message of this film would have been entirely different at the time of its debut. One of the things I enjoy most about watching silent films is that the people are in general not different at all from modern people. Their makeup is heavier as necessitated by the filming techniques of the time, their dress is different, but in mannerism and expression humans have generally always been humans. That being said, while I was able to watch David Holm's journey through his deepest regrets and miseries from a purely human standpoint, feeling sympathy for him just from the perspective of a person feeling bad for another person, the message this film intends to give is a pretty strong warning against drunkenness and a plea to turn to God and Jesus for your salvation. I do not in any way want to imply that this makes it less relatable. The personal turmoil shown onscreen and the moments of darkness resonate down the years regardless of their origin. But The Phantom Carriage comes from a time when the motive behind showing a story like Holm's would have been to encourage temperance and faith in God, and to show us what can happen when you become hopeless and faithless and neglect your responsibilities to family and society. That doesn't mean it can't still strike an emotional chord.

Oddly, it also seems like the film casts blame on Holm's wife for leaving him with their children, implying that standing by her husband is in some way more important than looking after hers and her children's safety, and that her leaving him is almost entirely responsible for him being in the state he's in, rather than his own actions. David Holm really is kind of a deadbeat when you think about it, but this film implores you to not think about it and instead view him as a person, not inherently good or bad, who has in him the ability to find his way back up from the depths of self-pity and depression (through God).

It's also interesting to watch this in a time of pandemic. The illness that ends up being the cause of Sister Edit's death was given to her by Holm, and the film implies that he contracted it just kind of through inevitability from his time being dirty and on the street. He is a consumptive and frequently coughs in others' faces in an attempt to bring his misery to them (successfully, in the case of the nurse). I think that Holm's disease is best viewed through the lens of metaphor rather than a literal desire to spread a contagion, though; he has become so full of self-loathing and bitterness that he wants to drag the whole world down with him, to see everyone with their healthy and happy lives that he envies and misses so much brought low by suffering the way he was. Despite all of this, despite knowing that getting too close risks contracting illness, the nurse darns his coat and tries desperately to befriend him, eventually falling in some kind of very upright and Godly love with him. Again, while to a modern viewer her sympathy and pure care for this ragged and jaded man does not need to have a motive beyond the sheer desire not to see another human suffer, at the time this would have been a template to the viewer for loving the poor and needy as an aspect of Christianity. Holm's eleventh-hour repentance when faced with the horrible consequence of his actions is a reminder that no person, no matter how far gone, is ever beyond salvation.

So, as I see it, this is not something to watch specifically for the purpose of watching a horror movie. While it has an extremely eerie atmosphere (practically any silent film does) and deals with very dark subject matter, it does not feel at  all like a film intended to frighten in the way that we would expect a horror movie to frighten us - it's more of a "scared straight" kind of fear, a "I don't want my life to be that way" fear. A "come to Jesus" moment, if you will. But I was absolutely taken by this film and the raw emotion it portrays, the way the actors are so un-self-consciously given over to their roles in a way that breaks from the stiff stage acting more common in American and British silent films of the era. The performances in The Phantom Carriage are far more fluid and messy than one would expect from this kind of film. While I did say that you could technically watch this with no soundtrack, the musical cues are of vital importance to enhancing the emotional highs and lows, and I would definitely recommend you find at least some kind of accompaniment. This was not at all a bad film to be watching as I crossed from 2022 over to 2023. I hope the new year brings us all excellent first-time watches and many happy returns from our old favorites as well.