The Phantom Carriage

1921 drama

Rating: 16/20

Plot: According to legend, the last person who dies during a calendar year is required to drive the titular carriage to pick up dead souls for the next calendar year. That person looks to be David Holm, a drunken jackass who, for reasons that aren't explained immediately, a dying Salvation Army soldier is asking to see. Holm's old friend, the current phantom carriage driver, takes his disembodied soul on a journey through his sins.

A bit A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life, this funky little tale of regret and redemption was hugely influential on fellow Swede Ingmar Bergman who was quoted as saying "The Phantom Carriage is the best motherfucking movie I've ever seen. It's my generation's The Bad News Bears." Some of it just looks like a slow silent drama, and I don't really like my silent films this "talky" with a dependency on title cards to tell the story. Like most silent movies, this one is most effective when the visuals are allowed to tell the whole story. However, the imagery and special effects, eerie double exposure shots, make this a haunting and, by the end, emotional experience. I really liked the acting. The guy who played Holm overdid it at times with some exaggerated laughing or arm-flailing, but for the most part, this didn't look like 1920's silent melodrama acting at all. And the story telling seemed really ahead of its time with its use of flashbacks and even flashbacks-within-flashbacks that had me scrambling for a plot synopsis to make sure I was keeping up. I've read that people hate some of the music in different releases of this, but I liked the music in this--all scratchy violins and ambient noises. And if you like movies where crazy guys are killing doors with axes like Jack in The Shining, this might have the first on-screen ax-to-door scene in movie history.

The little kid inside me loves that Swedish films end with the word slut.