Critics reviews

Whenever I revisit THE SEVENTH SEAL, what hits me hardest isn't the heavy symbolism or the theological discourse, but rather the material involving the traveling players. Along with the romance in SUMMER WITH MONIKA, these passages epitomize the earthiness and sensuality that course through the first decade or so of Ingmar Bergman's filmmaking career, communicating not just fascination with but also enthusiastic love for other people.

The scythe and the chessboard, the scorched earth and the pestilence of doubt: "Oh, you and your visions..." Ingmar Bergman at once engraves his modern inquiry in medieval stone, a post-Hiroshima brooder in a Grünewald canvas comprises the allegory, unbearably bleak and comical... In Bergman's most iconic expression of existential yoke, life is an unwinnable game postponed long enough to discover we know nothing.