The Seventh Seal Review

Bergman's images are so widely copied that it takes effort to see them fresh, and they hold up. Gunnar Fischer burned the sky to white and printed the figures near black, so the beach chess game reads as a woodcut rather than a location, and the closing silhouette of the dead led over a hill by Death is composed like a medieval frieze. Max von Sydow plays Antonius Block as a man whose problem is not fear but the silence he keeps getting instead of a reply, and Bengt Ekerot's Death is played with a bureaucrat's patience, mildly amused by delay.

The strongest scene is the witch burning, where the knight looks into a girl's eyes hoping to see whatever she claims to see and finds nothing but terror, then quietly gives her a drug to spare the last minutes. Against that, the strawberries-and-milk interlude with the juggler's family is the film's actual answer, offered without argument. The allegory is stated aloud more often than it is dramatized, and the squire's cynicism can read as a mouthpiece. The flagellant procession remains genuinely frightening.