The Death of the great purveyor of doom Ingmar Bergman should have come as no surprise to him. He’s been waiting for it to arrive from the moment he sat Max Von Sydow on the beach to play chess with Death itself. This parable of modern apocalyptic nuclear paranoia still resonates but in an altogether different way. The Knight and his loyal but irreverent servant take us on road trip through a black plague ravaged Swedish coastline after returning from the Holy Wars. A story that confronts, belief, faith, hypocrisy and challenges the big existential questions of why, what, where and who am I is never going to be light fare but that’s where the big surprise lies. The benefit of hindsight and the ability to unwrap a new shiny DVD and watch it again after many years shows the film in a new modern light. It’s funny and it’s meant to be, it’s also deeply serious but in the hands of a young Bergman he found a delicate balance between the two. It’s the film of his I like the most, probably for those reasons. It’s also his most cinematic and least theatrical of work on film. Oddly it’s till his most famous piece of work in film but now the open that the alleged film buffs turn their back on. That’s pretentious crap and it tells you a lot about how people in the creative part of the film business think in the UK, they prefer theatre and I wish they would all find a way back to the place they love the most and leave cinema in the hands of those who love it, participate, watch and want to make it in it’s purest form, not unlike Bergman before he became smug.