The Phantom Carriage (Körkarlen)

Wednesday 3 September at 7.30pm

Victor Sjöström | Sweden | 1921 | 106 mins | censors rating TBC

An alcoholic’s life is changed through love and an encounter with the Grim Reaper in this film of uncanny beauty and inventiveness.

“Ingmar Bergman called The Phantom Carriage “one of the major emotional and artistic experiences of my life,” and he drew upon it both visually and thematically for his own Wild Strawberries, which starred Carriage’s director and lead actor, the great Victor Sjöström. Adapted from the novel by Nobel Prize-winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf, The Phantom Carriage is based on a legend that the last person to die before the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve is doomed to take up the reins of Death’s chariot and collect the souls of the departed for the coming year.”—David Sterritt, TIFF Lightbox

“The movie is electrifyingly realistic in terms of acting and nuance, while also being proudly expressionistic in its fantasy—as when, via double-exposure, the Grim Reaper parks his carriage in the ocean to retrieve a woman’s soul left over from a shipwreck. All told it’s a consistently gorgeous movie, with cinematography by Sweden’s dominant eye, Julius Jaenzon, lighting the semi-transparent ghosts as carefully as the ‘reality’ and indulging in genuinely inspired imagery.”—Kate Stables, Sight & Sound