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Few have been the times when someone says "I love you" on screen and those words resonate to the audience with the same tenacity they resonate to who they're said to in the story. Bergman's The Seventh Seal accomplishes this within it's first 15 minutes. This alone is an accomplishment worthy of applauding. The rest of the movie is such as well. Seal deals with death as a theme as extensively as Chan-Wook Park's revenge-trilogy dealt with... well, revenge. The refreshing aspect of this to this day is that The Seventh Seal does not only portray death as a depressing thing, but it makes a point about appreciating all the time we have before experiencing it. Even nowadays most studies on the subject are simple-minded explorations of how depressing the whole thing is (Wristcutters: A Love Story being a prime example). The Seventh Seal shows us that a movie about anything that has a set mood to it should always be able to transcend the expectations the viewer sets for it in his or her mind. This is something the film accomplishes perfectly. It has it's flaws regardless; for example some things feel very weird for anyone who has not researched into the traditional ways of the crusades, and Bergman doesn't really bother to try to explain these traditions to us either. The audio plane is also sometimes rather annoying to the ear, as the sound is often too loud and ear-screeching regardless of what your tv's volume may be. Overall though this is one of the best films to ever truly capture the essence of death.
9/10
