Viktor Sjöström was the leading director of the Golden Age of Swedish cinema in the 1910s and early 1920s. The Phantom Carriage is an extraordinarily sophisticated film for 1921, full of flashbacks and impressive special effects. It opens on New Year’s Eve with Edit, Salvation Army volunteer, dying. She unexpectedly begs her caregivers to fetch the town drunk, David Holm, to her bedside. Meanwhile Holm sits drinking in a graveyard and telling two drunken friends the legend of the phantom carriage, the vehicle that carries away the souls of the newly dead; it is driven each year by the last person to die at the end of the previous year. Holm then dies at midnight, and the carriage arrives, with its current driver ready to turn the job over to him. Flashbacks enact both the circumstances of how the heroine met Holm and the happy family whom Holm had alienated. It’s a deeply affecting story, wonderfully acted and staged. The famous superimpositions that portray the carriage and the dead are highly ambitious and impressively executed—an all executed in the camera rather than through lab work. – Kirstin Thompson