DIRECTOR: Victor Sjöström
PRODUCER: Charles Magnusson
PRODUCTION CO: Svensk Filmindustri
SCREENPLAY: Victor Sjöström, based on the novel Körkalen by Selma Lagerlöf
​PHOTOGRAPHY: Julius Jaenzon
EDITOR: Eugen Hellman
WITH: Victor Sjöström (David Holm), Hilda Borgström (Anna Holm), Tore Svennberg (Georges), Astrid Holm (Edit), Concordia Selander (Edit's Mother), Lisa Lundholm (Maria) 

REVIEWS

“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. Sjöström plays David Holm, an alcoholic layabout who encounters the phantom carriage after he is killed in a brawl, and (shades of Dickens' A Christmas Carol) is taken on a flashbacked tour of his life, including his relationship with a Salvation Army sister who fervently believes in the possibility of his redemption. Combining a moving morality tale with groundbreaking special effects, The Phantom Carriage is ‘Sjöström's most dazzling achievement' (David Sterritt).”

​– TIFF Lightbox


“A classic from the rise of Swedish cinema in the early 1920s, this Selma Lagerlöf-based morality tale might be Sjöstrom’s greatest claim to fame before moving to Hollywood in 1924. Certainly it’s a roiling, vivid piece of work which either heavily influenced the Germans of that decade or shared much of their post-war DNA in terms of visuals and the Euro-fad for reconstituted folktales… 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

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Whanganui
Monday, 28 April, 7.00pm

Nelson   
Wednesday, 07 May, 6.00pm

Queenstown  
Tuesday, 27 May, 8.00pm

Palmerston North   
Wednesday, 18 June, 6.00pm

Hamilton  
Monday, 21 July, 6.30pm

Canterbury 
Monday, 25 August, 7.00pm

Dunedin
​Wednesday, 03 September, 7.30pm

​Auckland 
Monday, 22 September, 6.15pm

​New Plymouth   
Wednesday, 22 October, 6.00pm
SWEDISH CINEMA >>