Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

66th Kill

Sort of a Swedish take on A Christmas Carol or It's a Wonderful Life but set at New Year rather than Christmas. But darker and hopeless. I'm going to keep this film up my sleeve as a New Years' tradition - you know, to put on when I want everyone to get out of my house. Perfect mood dampener.

OK, I can see how this influenced Ingmar Bergman to make movies. I feel echoes of The Phantom Carriage all through Bergman's filmography. It exhibits that startling cruelty that Bergman seemed to see all around him, in the people he knew.

I know how cruel people can be. In my own experience, cruelty is something that has always happened at a distance. People act like assholes in absentia, mostly. Cruelty hasn't often been that honest that people have committed it baldly in front of my eyes.

In this movie, as in many Bergman films, characters are cruel to each other in very overt ways. In this case, our protagonist is the problem. David Holm, something of a tramp, a frequenter of Salvation Army hostels, an imbiber of much alcohol, a guy who stands there swaying while he stares bleary-eyed at you and you wonder at what moment he's going to take a swing at you. The film starts with him refusing to go see a Salvation Army nurse who has summoned him to her death bed. It's enigmatic in its tone of dismissiveness - how can he say no, but why does she want to see this guy anyway?

The film mainly tells its narrative via flashback and the structure works well - setting up these strange situations only to slowly explain them in long remembrances of times past. The titular "phantom carriage" is Death's wagon, and the last person to die each New Year's Eve before the stroke of midnight has to become the driver of the carriage, spending the next year collecting the souls of the dead. Doesn't sound so bad, except apparently every night passes as if it takes a hundred years, so that makes it a 36,500 year sentence (36,600 years in a leap year). It's really used as a narrative device. I really don't think this should be considered a horror film, any more than A Christmas Carol should be considered a horror tale just because it features ghosts.

It's a powerful film. My only issue - and it was hard for me to surmount - is the sheer bastardry of David Holm, despite Victor Sjöström's magnificent performance. He's just such a shit, and you need to be able to care enough about his redemption. But there is one scene where he bends down and deliberately blows his tuberculotic breath onto his two sleeping little girls - gloating about it and laughing when his wife screams at him not to infect them with his consumption - and at that point I just hated his fucking guts. I couldn't come back from that as far as the character goes, and it just sort of caused me to fall out with the movie slightly, because the fact is I just didn't care what happened to him after that.

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

Oh, I don't know - this is really not a horror film - but the moment when the dying nurse (she also caught TB off this asshole) hopes to see Holm to check that her well-wishing prayer for him had been granted by God, only to see him as an abject, hopeless, desolate ghost in the service of Death, is just one of the film's more confrontationally bleak moments.