Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Georges and Anne are in their eighties. They are cultivated, retired music teachers. Their daughter, who is also a musician, lives abroad with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested.
Amour is a quietly devastating film anchored by extraordinary performances from Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva, whose work ranks among the finest screen acting of the decade. Haneke's cinematography is austere and precise, confining us almost entirely to the apartment in a way that becomes suffocating and profound. The ending — unflinching and deeply ambiguous — is genuinely haunting and earns its place as one of cinema's braver conclusions. The plot is deliberately minimal, essentially a chamber piece about decline and devotion, which is purposeful but limits its score. Novelty is solid but not exceptional: Haneke's cold-eye approach to intimate tragedy is very much his established mode, and while the execution is masterful, the conception does not fully reinvent his own template.