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I first tried to watch this movie a few years ago. I found it dull and complicated, and I could never get into it. Being from Sweden, I’ve been force-fed some Bergman in my youth, and I never could appreciate him. But, in the last few years, I’ve caught up with some of his movies, and really liked a lot of them.

And I must say, I sort of liked this movie this time around. The story is about a knight called Antonius Block (Max von Sydow) who returns to Sweden from the crusades in the 14th century along with his squire Jöns (Gunnar Björnstrand). He is met by the plague and general unrest in the population, who believe that the plague is their fault — God is punishing them for their sins. Antonius meets Death (Bengt Ekerot), who says he has come to claim Antonius’s life, but the knight needs more time, so he decides to play a game of chess with Death to stall for time. Hey, I never claimed it was subtle.

Of course, the point here is that Death is always going to win. Buying time isn’t going to help you. But Antonius doesn’t want to buy time simply because he wants to live a little longer — no, he needs more time to get some crucial questions answered about life and how to face Death.

Anyway, Antonius and his squire (who is darkly hilarious, by the way) meet up with a troupe of travelling actors. I liked a lot of those scenes, but there is a subplot involving a blacksmith, whose wife runs off with one of the actors, which I didn’t think worked at all. Instead I would have liked to have seen more scenes with Antonius.

Bergman mixes a lot of absurdity and surreal humour here. One marvellous scene has Death using a saw to cut down a tree where a man is perched. Clearly, Death has no qualms about partaking in some manual labour to get his man. Overall, the character of Death is very cool.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not all artsy-fartsy existential stuff. There are a lot of things we can connect with in this story, and the idea of the church exhibiting control over the people by instilling fear in them is remarkably timely.

I loved how, in the end, even Death has no answers to Antonius’s questions. He knows no more than man does. In the end, everybody dies, and all you can do is live your life anyway. I think Death is trying to make the point that even if it’s inevitable that he’s one day going to come and claim you, life is still worth living.

Bergman clearly struggled with some of these existential questions himself, and at times it gets a bit preachy and surreal for my taste, but I think ultimately he has made a satisfying movie with a lot of nuance. Oh, and it looks gorgeous, too.