Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme four, part three - a silent horror film!
(Chosen by John!)
The last time I reviewed The Phantom Carriage, much of my discussion centered on the film's most notable supernatural element, of the last poor soul to die at the strike of New Years' midnight condemned to drive Death's carriage over nights that last thousands of years until the clock's next year-marking strike. What I identified as "the real meat of the film" occupies a rather brief paragraph before I get back to meditating on personifications of death and the overall effect of dwelling in semi-darkness through the cinematic medium. In my defense, I was just getting started with long-form reviewing at this point, and trying to spit out my reviews soon as I finished watching to boot. On this rewatch, I think it good and right to give said meat some proper focus, and pick apart just what makes Victor Sjöström's yarn of a wretch redeemed at great cost tick along so well.
I find it notable how the film allows us to think of David as a real bastard before we truly know him. The opening sequences focus on the bedbound Sister Edit, dying of tuberculosis and begging those around her to summon one David Holm to her side for one final meeting before her expiration. Scenes of her attendants debating the wisdom of this decision follow, and lead into said attendants scouring the small Swedish village for some sign of this mysterious man whose presence a woman of the faith desires so greatly - but to no avail. Dialogue hints towards David Holm deliberately dodging those who seek his presence, cuing us into his insensitivity towards those in pain and need. We then shift focus to listen in on a drunkard regaling his friends with strange recollections of a deceased friends' beliefs about those who die at the year's final chime, presented visually through a series of stacked flashbacks. While Georges' story about the Phantom Carriage is depicted with the film's first instance of double exposure visuals in a manner that imparts otherworldly, deathly seriousness, and Tore Svennberg's performance within David's flashback personifies a man hollowed with fear at the prospect of such a fate befalling anyone, Sjöström plays the man's pantomimed speaking on either side of the flashbacks with a silent, dismissive cackle, even as he speaks of Georges' passing in such a way as to condemn him to the fate he so feared. It is only after we separately understand the concept of David Holm as someone who'd actively avoid a dying woman's request and this nameless man as one who laughs at misery and suffering, a good half-an-hour into the film, that we're informed they are one and the same, effectively doubling our disgust.
When Georges arrives as the driver of the Phantom Carriage to inform David of his fate for the next year and expound on how he came to this state, the way Sjöström chooses to present and cut the tale short further exemplifies how he characterizes David as a worm who deserves his fate. Pastoral scenes of David as a happily married family man with two beautiful children last only a brief time before Georges enters the scene and tempts David into a life of disorderly drunken abandonment, but they speak to how deep this man's faults run, especially to a modern eye. Much as these scenes were likely intended as a rail against alcoholism and the damaging effects it wreaks upon society (especially given the original Selma Lagerlöf novel's commissioned purpose as public education about tuberculosis), I see David's quick descent as emblemizing the true immaturity of his soul. What kind of man would turn to such vicious, nasty behavior as deliberately destroying a kindly Salvation Army woman's hard work on repairing his coat with full knowledge of the infectious risk she took in doing so after but a few rounds at the bottle and a brief stint in jail, if not one who didn't truly appreciate what he has? True, the loss of his family is a devastating blow, but we begin this stretch of film with a David who acts the regular family man, and end it with one willing to risk others' deaths just because he's feeling particularly mean this morning, separated by only a month or two at most. ANY minor slip would've brought him to this state, and exposed his unfitness to do more than forlornly usher souls to the beyond.
Most interesting of all to me on this watch, I find it fascinating how Sjöström continues David's damnation through the final stretch, and yet still finds reason to bring about his redemption. When Georges forces David's spirit to stand beside Sister Edit's bed, and listen to her recollections about his life since she knew him, it paints a picture of a soul only a few shades removed from a true moral blackness. In these passages, David deliberately coughs on people in the hopes his consumption will finish them off, professes a profound hatred for all joy in life, hunts his wife all across Sweden to the point of driving her to illness and exhaustion, reunites with her under false pretenses, deliberately risks infecting his children, and pulls what would become known in sixty years' time as A Jack Torrance with an axe - the only thing saving him from total irredeemablity is his unwillingness to take a swing at his wife once free. Worst of all, the infection David earlier passed to Edit claims her life towards the picture's end, robbing the world of a truly selfless soul, one who looked on a wretch like David and saw someone deserving kindness and love and sacrifice, and pursued these beliefs to no avail beyond their respective deaths and the increased suffering of all who knew him. There is practically no reason to want this man to do anything except suffer for the millennia that will pass before he must hand the carriage's reins over to another unfortunate bastard.
And yet he is redeemed. When David Holm catches sight of his wife, in utter poverty, preparing poison to kill her children and take her own life to end their suffering, he is overcome with such agony at Georges' powerlessness over the living that he is granted a reprieve. He wakes in the graveyard where he expired, rushes home, saves his wife, and convinces her of his true desire to reform, uttering the above-quoted prayer as the film's final word. To my eye, David has Sister Edit's selfless kindness to thank for his salvation. In life, her actions were met only with vindictive destruction and hateful rhetoric, which poisoned her and sank David further into his vagabond life of depravity. In death, however, as David watches his life over again at Georges' side, seeing his cruelty with eyes free from its blinding effects, what stands out most is how far Edit went in the name of trying to help, even on so little a matter as patching the holes in his coat. It is the sight of someone truly pure giving her all to the very end and no avail that makes David cower on the floor in an attempt to hide from the horror of his own life throughout the film's latter half, and it is the knowledge of how his living sins will continue to consume and rend apart all he held dear well past his death that gives rise to divine intervention, enabling David to truly repent, and earn a second chance at spiritual maturation before his final time of dying.
He does not deserve this. He cost the world far, far too much in life, and stands as such a heartless, spineless bastard, I can't blame myself from nearly two years back for thinking Sjöström should've leaned into the abyss and denied David any salvation. But at the same time, seeing a hopeless sinner realize the full implications and effects behind his careless actions and come to a second chance through purest anguish is the whole point of The Phantom Carriage. The scenario's horror lies with its connotations beyond all else, its staying power with the impossibility of its conclusion. Sister Edit's suffering and untimely death only possess a silver lining if we allow for the man she thought savable to the bitter end to be saved and grow beyond what he once was. If, and only if the worst amongst us are treated as if they can one day become better is Death's terrible sting lessened, and only then does the empty void beneath the hood possess and deserve a human face. S'a very Christian message, and one I'm happy to go along with for the sake of emotional wholeness.
4/5
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