UK Release Date: 11-02-2008
Price: £15.99
UK Certificate: U
Director: Victor Sjöström
Country: Sweden
Distributor: Tartan

Victor Sjöström is probably best remembered these days for his moving performance as the elderly Prof Borg in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, but he was also one of the great directors of the silent era – a founding father of cinema in his native Sweden and, for a brief few years before the coming of sound, a wildly inventive Holly­wood filmmaker responsible for Lilian Gish’s finest hour in his haunting The Wind.

The Phantom Carriage (origin­ally Körkarlen) dates from 1921 and finds Sjöström at the height of his powers, delivering a powerful tale of human misery and supernatural forces marked by considerable technical innovation and a fine performance from the director himself as David Holm, a vicious, drunken wastrel whose moral decay is only revealed to him when he is forced to review his life (it’s intriguing to note the influence on Wild Strawberries, in which we see a much older Sjöström once again forced into a reassess­ment of his past through a series of dreams and waking visions).

Beginning at the deathbed of a young Salvation Army girl – why so, we only discover much later – and unfolding its narrat­ive through a complex structure of flashbacks and stories-within-stories, the film uses the device of the titular Phantom Carriage – a sort of ghostly, perambulating Grim Reaper (one thinks of Bergman again), its driver doomed to collect dead souls until relieved of duty each New Year by the last person to peg out before the stroke of Midnight – to meld its scenes of Earthly degradation with those of the invisible realm of Death. Sjöström’s use of double expos­ures to visualise the overlapping of these two worlds – we see Holm’s ‘spirit body’ arise from his corpse, for instance – must have been quite jaw-dropping in 1921, and remains remarkably haunting and effective today.

This edition of the film features a specially composed score by KTL – Stephen O’Malley of US drone metal band Sunn O))) and Peter Rehberg (aka Pita) a British electronic composer; they really shouldn’t have bothered, as this cacophonous ‘soundscape’ of reverb-heavy guitar drones and inconsequential bleeps not only fails to engage with the rhythms and dynamics of the film in any meaningful way but is positively distracting, leading this reviewer to watch the film in glorious silence.