The Seventh Seal (1957)

The Seventh Seal (1957)

starring Max von Sydow

directed by Ingmar Bergman

96 minutes

Swedish with English subtitles

Antonius Block, a knight, and Jof, his squire, return from the Crusades and discover how the plague, the Black Death, has changed the land they left ten years before. The knight meets Death but he is not ready to go just yet. He challenges death to a game of chess.

Block and Jof are traveling back to Block's castle. Along the way they collect a few people who travel with them (an actor, an actress, and their child; a blacksmith and his wife; a teenage girl whom Jof saves from a predatory priest). They also cross paths with a young woman who has been accused of being a witch and is to be sacrificed for causing the plague, as her captors put it. 

Block encounters Death more than once. Each time they meet their game gets a little closer to ending. 

Thoughts

Block has been away for a long time. He has changed in that time and become curious about things that (I guess) he once accepted at face value. He seeks answers. Does he find those answers? Why did he insist on playing a game with Death? Was it just to buy time so that he could die at home with his wife? I'm not sure. The ending feels a little ambiguous to me. I feel as though I might have missed something.

Max von Sydow is the only actor in this movie that I have seen in any other movies. This is the only one of Ingmar Bergman's films that I have seen.

I have seen The Seventh Seal once before, about 20 years ago. I couldn't find it in my list of movies that I have seen which goes back to 2001. It should have been in my Netflix records but I couldn't find it there. It wasn't until I searched my e-mails that I found a mention of it in an e-mail to a friend from Sep 2003. There were two movies mentioned in that e-mail but the other one was already in my list. I'm not sure how the Seventh Seal was missed.

I found some of the scenes towards the end, where it looks like Block and his entourage are trying to get back to his castle safe and sound to be very emotionally moving. I wasn't quite as moved by the story up to that point. I didn't quite understand what it was building towards.

This movie isn't for everyone. I can see some people being bored by it. I found the stoic way in which Block confronts Death to be very powerful.