If Antonius should win, he can keep his life. Best of all, the game is played intermittently over a period of days, which gives Antonius freedom of movement to make new friends.
These include Jof (Nils Poppe), a good-natured if cowardly actor, his hottie wife Mia (Bibi Andersson), and their infant son. There's also oafish blacksmith Plog (Åke Fridell), his attractive wife Lisa (Inga Gill), a hottie brunette (Gunnel Lindblom) who makes sympathetic faces but doesn't say much, and a short-haired (but attractive) young blonde woman (Maud Hansson) condemned as a witch.
We even get to meet Antonius' wife (Inga Landgré), who hasn't seen her husband in ten years.
Antonius and Jöns are jaded and matured by their long involvement in the Crusades. But they are no match for Death, a moderately smug fellow who seems to take some pleasure in his grim reaping.
How others will see it. The Seventh Seal is the best known (and best regarded) film by legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, not to be confused with legendary Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman. Ingmar Bergman has long had a large cult following, particularly in Europe, although his films were never blockbusters.
The Seventh Seal is black and white, and subtitled. Yet for American viewers, it may Bergman's most accessible film, because it has a clear story and no shortage of attractive women. Despite an obsession with death, it even manages to scrape up a happy ending: presumed happiness and good health for likeable actor Jof, his hottie wife Mia, and their infant.
User ratings at imdb.com are extremely high, but men like the film more than do women, and the ratings decline steadily with increasing age. My explanation for this is that among adults, young males are the easiest to convince that a film is 'important' or 'brilliant.' Women are more likely to trust their own emotional response to a movie, and older audiences are more likely to trust their own judgment, rather than rely upon a groupthink consensus. After all, there was a time after 9-11 when most Americans thought that George W. Bush was doing a great job as President. They were wrong.
How I felt about it. From the viewpoint of Death, one of its major characters, The Seventh Seal is a black comedy. How else to explain why Antonius, a 'carrier' who knows he is to die at any moment, gathers up his friends and takes them to visit his wife. It would have been more thoughtful for Antonius to go off by himself to die, rather than involving others.
The film is obsessed with death, which it presents as something inevitable, omnipresent, and miserable. This is in direct contrast to the usual cinematic depiction of death, as something avoidable and directly caused by evildoers. The primarily young audiences that attend movie theaters generally have only casual encounters with death, in the form of funerals for aged relatives. Death becomes more familiar with increasing age, as it begins to take peers. Unpleasant as it may be, death is necessary for evolution to proceed. Genetic advantages obtained by the next generations eventually supplant our own. We can either step out of the way gracefully, or flail on the ground like Jonas Skat (Erik Strandmark) does. I suggest the former.