The Seventh Seal

Established Bergman as a director of arresting visual and intellectual power. [6 March 1993]

A magically powerful film.

Prepare to fawn at Bergman’s most metaphysically profound film; you may even laugh.

Dark but beautiful.

Ingmar Bergman's dark masterpiece effortlessly sees off the revisionists and the satirists; it is a radical work of art that reaches back to scripture, to Cervantes and to Shakespeare to create a new dramatic idiom of its own.

Max von Sydow gives a performance of a high order as the knight who returns from the Crusades to find his country at the mercy of plague and witch hunts.

The film in fact consists of a series of dull speeches spun on simple themes; Bergman barely tries to make the material function dramatically.

This is certainly a quirky and surreal watch - a surprisingly watchable one. The plot doesn't exactly entirely make sense but it also doesn't entirely matter. I'd say there's an element of farce about it and it even features some (brief) toilet humour/references, which is surprisingly for a film of its age (it was released in the late 1950s). Its different to the usual black and white films I see or have seen but I thought it was surprisingly amusing and surreal, so its certainly an entertaining watch, even though it covers quite serious thematic material, mainly mortality. As the film went on, I felt more engrossed in the story and the characters, which has to be a good sign, hence my rating. The slow drum beats often present in the background help to add to the tension as well. I'd recommend this particularly to fans of quirky, classic (perhaps arthouse type) films I suppose - after all, who doesn't want to see a film with scenes featuring death playing chess? (I wonder if the Bill & Ted Bogus Journey film with a similar scene was taking the pee out of that? I bet you didn't expect to read 'Bill & Ted' in a review of a film such as this but, well, there you go!).

The Seventh Seal is definitely an interesting film that deserves its status as a classic. Well-acted and directed. What made it intriguing for me was the main character's attempts to thwart off the personification of Death while also trying desperately to figure out if there was life after death (so to speak).

I don't think it is a bad movie at all, it's just not my cup of tea. Nonetheless I apreciate how original, intelligent and thought-provoking it is.