Having returned from the Crusades, the knight Antonius Block – played by Max Von Sydow (Wild Strawberries, The Exorcist, Flash Gordon) – finds Sweden besieged by the plague and encounters the cloaked figure of Death (Bengt Ekerot) on a beach.
Interspersing the iconic game of chess with Death, Bergman’s film provides a journeying enquiry into man’s search for meaning and faith.
Regularly listed in the top ten films off all time, Bergman’s metaphysical allegory is stark and poetic testament to the silence of God and how man might respond, in the struggle to find purpose, to the overwhelming volume of such muteness.