The Phantom Carriage is an unavoidable curse

The Phantom Carriage is a 1921 silent movie that impresses with its consistency, soundtrack, regular use of flashbacks - a technique still recent in films - and special effects. Taken in double exposure, expertly recorded by the cinematography of Julius Jaenzon and director Victor Sjöström, they portray spirits detaching from the bodies.

The story begins on New Year’s Eve with the kind SalvationArmy nurse Sister Edit (Astrid Holm) on her deathbed with pneumonia. Even in her last moments, she insists that she needs to see David Holm (Sjöström himself) because she wants to make sure she saved her

soul.

In the city cemetery, David, an evil man who abandoned his family for alcohol, drinks with two friends and speaks of his companion Georges (Tore Svennberg), who disappeared on December 31 of the previous year. We discover later that he actually died that day and that this occurrence subjects people to a curse.

Whoever dies on the last day of the year must drive the chariot of death for the next twelve months. David discovers this in the worst possible way. When arguing with friends, he ends up murdered, and it is Georges himself, as the driver of the sinister vehicle, who transfers the curse to him.

But before that, the former companion takes David on tour for all the mistakes made in the past. In a series of flashbacks, we witness all the drunkard’s torments to his family, to the point that his wife (Hilda Borgström) did not want to continue living.

We also see all the suffering of Edit, who committed for a year to save the soul of the alcoholic, even getting infected by him with the disease that is taking his life. At the last moment, face to face with the spectre that will lead her to the world of the dead, the salvationist still tries one last miracle.

The macabre film was watched by a child named Ingmar Bergman who, years later, would invite Sjöström to his film Wild Strawberries, coincidentally about death.