The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal is set in fourteenth-century Sweden during the Black Death. Antonius Block, a knight who has spent years fighting in the Crusades, returns home to a country ravaged by plague. Death appears before him, and Block, troubled by doubts about the existence of God, proposes a game of chess, hoping to delay the end and gain time to understand his own life. He travels with his squire Jöns and encounters a family of travelling players, Jof, Mia and their child, whose joy and simplicity stand against the suffering around them. Block becomes determined to perform one meaningful act before his life is claimed.

Ingmar Bergman directed and wrote the film, which came after Smiles of a Summer Night and before Wild Strawberries, in a career that would eventually run to twenty-four features. Max von Sydow plays Block, with Bengt Ekerot as Death, Gunnar Björnstrand as Jöns, and Nils Poppe and Bibi Andersson as the players. Allan Ekelund produced for SF Studios, and forty-six cast members are credited.

The film holds an 8.1 rating on IMDb from roughly 215,000 votes and the same score on TMDB, where the vote count is far smaller. A critics' rating of 9.5 from seventy-three reviews places critical appreciation noticeably above the strong but not exceptional audience scores.