The review

A knight comes home from the Crusades to a country sick with plague, and Death agrees to a game of chess. The game is what people have heard of. What they should keep is a juggler and his wife and their small child, sharing milk and wild strawberries on a hillside while the knight watches and remembers that a life can be ordinary and good. The knight's doubts are real. The film does not score points off them, and it does not dissolve them in a comfort.

Adults, and a patient older teenager. Not a costume of gloom for a room that wants to feel serious. Ask who is spared, and why the knight's last move is aimed at them rather than at his own escape. The answer is the only theology the picture insists on: a particular family, fed and sent on. A decade that made so many spectacles of meaninglessness also made this, in which a man who cannot settle his questions can still get a child out of the way of the plague. That is enough to keep.