Peter Hoskin

On the trail of <em>The Phantom Carriage</em>

If you’re after a profound cinematic experience, then you could do far worse than to invest in Victor Sjöström’s The Phantom Carriage (1921), which got its first UK DVD release yesterday. 

The premise of this silent, Swedish film is ripped from a dark fairytale.  Anyone who dies at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve is consigned to spend the next year riding the titular carriage and collecting the souls of the departed.  Cue, then, the brutal death of David Holm – a consumptive drunk, played by Sjöström himself – at the  portentous hour.  The carriage duly arrives, but its current occupant insists on revisiting David’s past life and its many evils.

It’s bleak – but gripping – stuff.  We learn that David tried to infect his former-wife and their children with tuberculosis, and that he succeeded in doing so in the case of a Salvation Army nurse.  Eventually,

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