The Greatest New Year's Eve movie of all time? Victor Sjostrom's THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE (1921, dir by Victor Sjostrom, Sweden, 107mns)

This movie is an amazing A CHRISTMAS CAROL variation for New Year's Eve with some pretty heavy, intense themes.

Family dysfunction, alcoholism, infidelity, narcissism, total selfishness. Leave it to the Swedes to make Ebeneezer Scrooge look like Abraham Lincoln compared to David Holm (played by the movie's director (!!) Victor Sjostrom).

The premise is genius high concept. Irredeemable David Holm collapses on New Year's Eve and is visited by a "Phantom Carriage" pulled by Death. But the catch is...David will now have to be the Death driver for a year to atone for his totally wasted life.

The movie then cuts back and forth as David is forced to revisit some of the scenes of his greatest awfulness. "Death" is actually David's friend , Georges, who died the previous New Year's Eve. And Georges lets David know the upcoming year is going to be beyond miserable.

Maybe you shouldn’t have died on New Year’s Eve and been such a jerk, David Holm…

Based on the 1912 Swedish novel, Thy Soul Shall Bear Witness! by Selma Lagerlof, The Phantom Carriage is one of world cinema's masterpieces. Its intricate structure of flashbacks and flashforwards, its expressive special visual effects, its intense existentialism made a deep impression on a very young Ingmar Bergman. Bergman would always cite THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE as one of the key movies that made him want to make movies.

And 35 years later, Bergman would cast an older Victor Sjostrom in the main role of Bergman's masterpiece WILD STRAWBERRIES, itself a movie about a conflicted man wrestling with his life in flashback, dream, and flash forward.

For movie lovers, there are also some crazy discoveries including (we won't spoil it in specifics here) the discovery that Stanley Kubrick may have lifted a very famous sequence from THE SHINING direct from a similar sequence here in THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE.

Maybe most important of all, THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE shows that existential transcendental crises need not be the sole domain of Christmas Eve and Christmas. New Years, though often mined for movie sequence, still feels like an under utilized holiday for cinema stories.

THE PHANTOM CARRIAGE nailed it 103 years ago. An incredible film. Check it out.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.