The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957) is Ingmar Bergman's philosophical drama, available to watch online on iFILM, with a young Max von Sydow in the lead.

Knight Antonius Block sails home to Sweden after ten years in the Holy Land and finds the plague tearing through his country. A pale figure in a black cloak is waiting on the shore — Death has come to collect him. Block offers a wager: a game of chess, and while the pieces stand he keeps breathing. He wants the borrowed time for one question that gnaws at him harder than dying ever could — whether God is there at all, when the world answers suffering with silence.

Along the road Block falls in with traveling players Jof and Mia and their baby, a blacksmith with a faithless wife, a girl being dragged to the stake. Bergman shot the film in barely a month, yet the image of chess played against the sea became one of cinema's most quoted frames. It took the Jury Prize at Cannes and still anchors almost every conversation about faith and mortality on screen. Stream The Seventh Seal (1957) online on iFILM.