Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Phantom Carriage!

Theme: Dark are the Veils of Death - Candlemass

Christmas has The Mothman Prophecies and Curse of the Cat People. Halloween has the Night of the Demons remake. New Year's Eve has but one kinograph of note, but it's arguably (and not even very arguably) the best silentkino and best Christian film of all time, and unlike most of my Greatest Movies of All Time of the Week, it might actually be the greatest movie of all time.

Big talk from a big bastard, you say? Well let me tell you a tale...

Victor Sjöström directs and stars as David Holm, an abusive, neglectful husband and mean drunk who delights in spurning offers of help from the local Salvation Army sisters and corrupting his peers with his nihilistic bullshit. In one scene, he tells a fellow consumptive (this was a disease in black-and-white times) that he coughs in people's faces to drag a few of them with him on the way out.

I mean this guy was a real jerk.

Silent cinéma is often ridiculed for its stylised performances, but Sjöström's showcase is uniquely compelling, probably because there's no vanity in it: his Holm is alternately loathsome, dastardly, pitiable, wretched, menacing, perversely charming and consumed with maddening sorrow. Windbag critics have made calling films "powerful" a punchline, but The Phantom Carriage merits the superlative and more. Anyway, Holm's degenerate existence is about to be rudely interrupted, for Death has come to him on New Year's Eve.

The ghostly transparency was cutting-edge at the time. 2bh, for what it is, it holds up better than most CGI from circa ever to now.

But while Sjöström's lesser pupil Bergman's later iteration of the Grim Reaper was more-or-less a hammy villain, Carriage's more unsettling vision has a mortal man enslaved to drive the titular cart to and fro nonstop for an interminable, enervating year collecting the souls of the departed until the next New Year's Eve comes round and his last client must become his successor - and it looks as though our miscreant protagonist is next up on the list.

Me working nights, or mornings, or on my day off.

WILL Holm be damned to drive the ghostly carriage? CAN he right the wrongs he's done in life before they take the lives of his beleaguered family? OR will it be the first one again, because I didn't have a third thing? I'm not telling, but the gut-punch denouement will have you searching your own compromised, endangered soul. Skip the forced party, hangover and chlamydia tests; watch The Phantom Carriage before the year is out.