The Seventh Seal

The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, starring Max von Sydow as a knight returning from the Crusades to a homeland ravaged by the Black Death, who challenges Death, personified as a pale robed figure, to a game of chess in order to delay his own end. The film interweaves the knight's theological doubt with the everyday lives of a traveling troupe of performers he encounters along the way, ending in a stylized dance of death silhouetted against the sky. The Seventh Seal is widely regarded as one of the defining works of art-house cinema and among the most recognizable films to grapple directly with religious doubt and mortality.