"This initially mystifying drama...slowly turns out to be a piercing and powerful contemplation of the passage of man upon this earth. Essentially intellectual, yet emotionally stimulating, too, it is as tough—and rewarding—a screen challenge as the moviegoer has had to face this year....an uncommon and fascinating film."



"Bergman's portentous medieval allegory takes its title from the Book of Revelations—'And when he (the Lamb) opened the seventh seal, there was a silence in heaven about the space of half an hour.' In the opening scene, a knight returning from the Crusades is challenged to a game of chess by the cloaked figure of Death (Ekerot), and from this point onwards an air of doom hangs over the action, like the hawk which hovers in the air above them. The time of Death and Judgment prophesied in the Bible has arrived, and a plague is sweeping the land. Bergman fills the screen with striking images: the knight and Death playing chess for the former's life, a band of flagellants swinging smoking censers, a young witch manacled to a stake. Probably the most parodied film of all time, this nevertheless contains some of the most extraordinary images ever committed to celluloid. Whether they are able to carry the metaphysical and allegorical weight which they have been loaded is open to question."



"Returning from the Crusades, a 14th-century knight finds his homeland devastated by the plague and swept by a religious mania. He discovers that he is no longer able to pray, but just as his faith reaches a low ebb, death comes calling in the person of a very grim reaper. The ending is a cliff-hanger: the knight challenges death to a chess game, hoping to win himself enough time to settle his doubts. Ingmar Bergman's 1956 film is still his most celebrated (probably because the stark imagery reproduces so well in still photographs), yet Bergman himself later repudiated it. It survives today only as an unusually pure example of a typical 50s art-film strategy: the attempt to make the most modern and most popular of art forms acceptable to the intelligentsia by forcing it into an arcane, antique mold (here the form of medieval allegory). The film in fact consists of a series of very dull speeches spun on simple themes; Bergman barely tries to make the material function dramatically."