Let me say right off that the subtitles for this movie were terrible.  Sometimes they were late, sometimes they appeared before anyone started speaking, sometimes they disappeared before I had the chance to read the whole of the text. And when there were exchanges of dialogue (which, oddly enough, does frequently occur in movies) it was often not apparent who was saying what.

But let's put that aside.  And let's also put aside the absurd Renaissance faire costuming.  And the sets that were about as convincing as those employed by community theaters.  Both are easily put down to the difference between making a movie in the fifties and making one today.  There was a time when the idea of a thing was more important than getting the details of the thing right.

The idea of the thing, then, is that a knight, Antonius Block, returns from defeat and misery in the Holy Land during (one of) the Crusades to find his native country in the grip of its own ravage, the Black Plague.  With him he brings his squire, who acts like a fool initially, but slowly displays a great insight when dealing with people.  Meanwhile his master is wrapped up in the famous chess game with Death, and his own search for God, in a land that He seems to have forsaken to disease.  The title of the film, The Seventh Seal is a reference to Revelations, the last chapter of the Christian Bible, and the coming of the end of the world.  And it seems very much like the end of the world.

It would be hard to claim that the thin tissue of actions comprise a plot.  In this world people are jounced together and people move apart.  Block plays for time with Death, and as he travels homeward, we see a cross-section of humanity; the dead, the sick, those who think such misfortune will not befall them, and those who are attempting to escape the plague through whatever means seem most likely to work, be they brutal and violent.  He gathers a train of people, or it is more fair to say, his squire gathers them, and Death follows in their wake, the wolf at their heels, or, perhaps, as a member of the party.  And along the way visions are seen, and philosophies are discussed, and songs are sung, and we learn a little bit about the earlier life of the knight, and much more about his uncertainty of what awaits him.  As he reaches out first to God, and then to the Devil, only to have no one answer, not even Death, who at least, is tangibly there.

It is not a happy movie, but it is not so bleak as I had been led to believe it would be.  It had a dignity in it, as men who have been through terrible things and come home to find they will have no peace there, but still cling to righteousness even in the burning chaos and madness around them.  Who still try to hold to their covenant with God, even when God seems to have broken faith with man, or worse, vanished.  But even here there is life, and laughter, and beauty, although we are not spared the other side of the coin, torture, death, disease.  The most haunting scene is in the center, when the players are singing of the devil and the priests lead a band of penitent through the square.  These are so beaten and broken by the punishments they have taken on to cleanse themselves of their sins that they can barely walk, and as they pass the scene is layered over a later shot, so that it appears that they are fading out of life, simply disappearing, ragged and pitiful, into the empty fields.