The Phantom Carriage: The Film That Haunted Bergman

In Sweden there is a folk legend that the last soul to die in the year — the very last, on the final stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve — is given a particular task. They must drive Death's carriage for the next twelve months. Every soul that passes from the world for that year is collected by them, one at a time. They drive through every storm, every silence, every empty hour. At the end of that year, on the following New Year's Eve, they pass the reins to whoever dies last after them.

It is a hard folktale to forget. Selma Lagerlöf turned it into a novel in 1912. And in 1921 a Swedish actor and director named Victor Sjöström adapted it into a film that has, in its quiet, devastating way, shaped the next hundred years of cinema in ways that almost nobody outside Sweden has fully appreciated.

The film is Körkarlen — in English, The Phantom Carriage. I ran it for the first time in 1922. I have not stopped thinking about it since.

A Folk Tale Told as Modernist Cinema

The story sounds melodramatic on paper. David Holm, a drunkard, dies at midnight on New Year's Eve. Death arrives — in the figure of a previous year's last-dier, a friend of David's named Georges — to collect him for the carriage. But before David takes up the reins for his terrible year of work, Georges shows him his life. Every cruelty David has ever committed. Every person he has hurt. The wife in the cottage with the tuberculosis-ridden children. The sister of charity who tried to save his soul and died praying for him.

The film, in this respect, is a kind of Swedish A Christmas Carol — a tale of moral reckoning, with a supernatural visitor, ending in redemption. What lifts it out of melodrama is Sjöström's direction.

His approach was austere. The acting is restrained almost to the point of absence. The compositions are spare and Lutheran in their seriousness. And the special effects — the double exposures that show the phantom carriage moving through the world of the living, transparent and unstoppable — are not used as spectacle. They are used as theology. The carriage moves through walls because death moves through walls. The driver is half here and half gone because the dead are half here and half gone.

Nobody had used double exposure this way before. After The Phantom Carriage, generations of filmmakers used it this way and have never been able to stop.

The Film That Haunted Ingmar Bergman

Ingmar Bergman watched The Phantom Carriage every year on New Year's Eve for almost his entire adult life. He said in interviews and writings that it was the film that taught him what cinema was for.

He was not the only Swedish director shaped by Sjöström — but he was the most articulate about it. Bergman wrote that the moment Georges arrives to collect David Holm — the door creaking open, the figure in the cloak, the awful certainty of the visit — was the moment he understood that cinema could carry the same metaphysical weight as a Bach cantata or a Rembrandt portrait.

When Bergman made Wild Strawberries in 1957, he cast Victor Sjöström — by then seventy-eight years old, nearly forty years after Körkarlen — as Professor Borg, the elderly man confronting the end of his life and the cruelties of his past. The casting was an act of conscious lineage. Sjöström had directed the film that taught Bergman the form. Bergman now returned the favour by making Sjöström the central image of his own film about a man at the gate.

Wild Strawberries would not exist without The Phantom Carriage. The Seventh Seal — Bergman's most famous film, the chess match with Death — owes its entire visual conception to what Sjöström did in 1921 with a cloaked figure and a carriage.

The line runs straight.

What David Holm Sees

The film's structure is daring even by modern standards. The bulk of The Phantom Carriage is a flashback inside a flashback inside a flashback — David Holm's life shown to him by Georges, in fragments that move forward and backward across decades.

What David sees is not his triumphs. He sees, in the order they happened, every moment he ruined another human being's life. His wife. His children. The sister of charity, Edit, who took him in and tried to lead him back to grace, and who eventually died of the tuberculosis David himself had given her.

By the time the flashback returns to the present — to David's body lying drunk in the graveyard at midnight — he has experienced something close to a complete moral autopsy. He sees who he has been. He sees who he could have been.

And then, in the film's strange and oddly hopeful ending, Georges does not take him for the carriage. The clock has not actually struck. He has been given one more year to undo what he can.

He goes home. The film closes on him kneeling at the bedside of his estranged wife and children, the morning coming up, the carriage having passed him by.

The Catholic Imagination in a Lutheran Country

The Phantom Carriage is fundamentally a Christian film, but a strange one — a film about grace and redemption made in a country whose state religion has, traditionally, been deeply suspicious of supernatural imagery.

Sjöström solved this by making the supernatural element as restrained as possible. The carriage is not gothic. It is not spectacular. It is a working-class horse carriage with a cloaked driver. The transparency of the figures is technically virtuosic but visually subdued. The supernatural in The Phantom Carriage feels less like a horror film than like a hard frost — present, undeniable, but quiet.

It is one of the reasons the film does not feel dated a century later. It does not try to overwhelm the viewer. It sits in the room with you. It makes its argument with the unhurried confidence of a man telling a story he knows is true.

The Booth and What Bergman Knew

I have run this film many times. More times than I have run most films from that decade. Something about it answers a question that the larger and louder German Expressionist horrors of the same period — Caligari, Nosferatu, Faust — never quite address.

Those German films are interested in evil. The Phantom Carriage is interested in regret.

The print I have is fading in places — the slow tragedy of nitrate stock catching up with it as it catches up with everything from that era. Restorations exist, and good ones, and they have rescued the film for new audiences. But there is something about a worn print of Körkarlen that suits the picture. The phantom carriage should look slightly faded. The dead should not be too bright.

Bergman knew this. He watched the film at New Year's because the ritual of it mattered — because the film was, itself, a kind of carriage that came to collect what he owed at the year's end. He would sit with it. He would let it work on him. He would emerge on January 1st changed in some small way.

I do not know how to recommend a film better than that. Watch it on New Year's Eve, alone, in the dark. See what it asks of you.

The carriage is always coming. The only question is what we have done while we waited.

— The Projectionist