"Send for David Holm!" That's the plea from a dying woman named Edit (played by the Danish actor Astrid Holm) on her bed to those looking after her; they reassure her that they'll try to locate him, even though it's fairly clear they won't. Edit may not be the main character in the film, but she's central to the drama in The Phantom Carriage from 1921, a tale of fantasy, horror, revenge, sin, and disillusionment that operates as a morality play. Based on Nobel-winning author Selma Lagerlöf's novel Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness!, the film is still considered one of the most renowned works in Swedish cinema.
Who is David Holm, the man a dying woman of kindness so desperately wants? The first ten minutes of the movie are devoted to the search for this mystery man; after another five minutes, with no sight of Mr. Holm, there still is not much hint of a plot. That is, until we meet three men in a graveyard. It's New Year's Eve, and they're a bit drunk, smoking cigarettes and laughing, despite the cold. One of them has a story to tell them, that of his friend named Georges (Torre Svennberg), who was quite a riot and good fun to be around, except on New Year's Eve, in which he would slouch in a horribly melancholy state, practically catatonic, refusing to drink and be merry with his pals. His reasons were his superstitious belief that whoever dies on New Year's Eve must ride Death's carriage as their "forlorn duty".
The carriage, as we see it, is chilling, even a century later. In a blue night, a bearded, enigmatic figure in a cloak goes about collecting souls of the deceased. Here, the audience witnesses the advanced special effects of the time by cinematographer Julius Jaenzon and lab executive Eugén Hellman. The most striking of these effects are the double exposure used whenever the semi-transparent carriage driver and his horse appear, making the actor look like a ghost. The production design of this film is phenomenal, especially the immaculate lighting. Blue was typically the favored tint for visualizing for viewers nighttime, but there's just something about how it's employed here that really adds to the eeriness. Matti Bye's score, included in the 1998 restoration, is among the best scores retroactively added to silent films, and supplements the cryptic nature of the film (as well as augmenting the comic relief).
Conveniently for the story, Georges did die on New Year's Eve (or so we're told), and eventually, we learn that the man telling the other two (and us, the audience) this spooky story is in fact David Holm. We then get David's story, how he was a decent man with a happy family before his alcoholism and violent outbursts ruined everything. Eventually, his wife took their children away from him. Consumed with thoughts of revenge, David fell deeper into a pit of despair. Holm is played by Victor Sjöström, who also directed The Phantom Carriage. Sometimes known in the United States as Victor Seastrom, he also directed the Hollywood film He Who Gets Slapped in 1924 starring Lon Chaney. But film fans today might recognize him most for playing the main character in the 1957 Swedish drama Wild Strawberries, directed by Ingmar Bergman, who claimed to have seen The Phantom Carriage at age 15 and watched it again every year.
With all due respect to Chaney, the man Sjöström directed in Hollywood, Sjöström was Sweden's "Man of a Thousand Faces", at least in this film. We see his David Holm in various different stages, from blissful to monstrous to remorseful, and he's fascinating to watch in all of them. Those appear to be real tears in his eyes as he watches à la "A Christmas Carol" different episodes of his adult life, and while it's a silent film, he says more with his eyes than title cards ever could. Another example of this is when he rips apart the jacket that Edit (in a flashback) had mended for him; it's unclear if this chaos brings him real joy or not, but he surely wants others' misery to make them think that it does. Thus, David is a man whose soul cannot be saved, and while Edit's obsession with him makes little sense, his abhorrent behavior makes it impossible to look away.
The Phantom Carriage uses different flashbacks within flashbacks; its non-linear storytelling helps keep the audiences' engagement through its two hours. This is a patient film, even for a Swedish one (why Edit must see David before she dies is not explained until part three, passed the first hour), and while it's often been described as a horror film, there's hardly anything horrifying about it (today at least). One scene that is rather terrifying, though, involves David chasing after his wife, and (without giving away too much, even though the film is almost one hundred years old), its inspiration for a famous horror film will be more than obvious to modern audiences. Any film that inspires practically a shot-by-shot copy scene of terror generations later clearly deserves its iconic status.