Critics reviews

A careful, meticulous examination of mortality, intimacy, and loss, Amour is the rare film with the patience and courage to stare unblinkingly at the process of aging and impending mortality. Amour does not tell its story with sweeping violin strings. The emotion comes honestly (and devastatingly) through Haneke's commitment to small details.

Just as forcefully as in FUNNY GAMES, when the murderer winks at the camera and thereby implies our complicity, AMOUR implicates us, the viewer. "Did you imagine that moving into your twilight years would be serene and dignified? Perhaps not." Isn't that what that pigeon's all about?

Haneke naysayers... argue that the writer-director presses his microscope's glass against his specimens so forcefully as to deny them movement and oxygen. Many say the same about Kubrick, not necessarily without cause. There's no sense that Haneke compromised on his methodology for Amour. If anything, he challenges himself by limiting his capital to an effective cast of two, a single set, and a small set of concerns, primarily the death that steals the mind before it claims the body.

Amour taps into deep, unforgettable feelings, and invokes them powerfully. For all its flaws, it's a must-see.

Michael Haneke, another formal master whose work blurs the line between art and shock cinema, has fashioned a body-horror drama nearly universal in its terrifying "appeal." (Perhaps that's why it won last year's Palme d'Or.) Extinguishing the golden-glow mawkishness typical of death-bed movies, Amour is a feel-bad milestone: the most brutally honest picture ever made about growing old and wasting away.

The director films his elderly couple with a superficial simulacrum of wisdom and experience, strips them of traits in order to reduce them to the function of the film to render the appalling act justifiable, to strip out the appearance of mixed emotions. And yet, what comes through is that Haneke likes filming a killing, takes a smirkingly ghoulish look at the act, and takes unconscious pleasure in the unconscionable.

This is an unforgettable love story set at the close of day, as tragic and beautiful in its way as "Tristan und Isolde," and a portrait of the impossible beauty and fragility of life that will yield new experiences to every viewer and every viewing.

In keeping within its limited boundaries, in applying an unflinching style to an inevitable process, [it] has a certain perfection to it, but what Haneke expresses thereby—that culture is no protection from the final horror, that death be not proud—is so meager as to make it a single-minded, barren perfection. Haneke remains, by his rules, infallible. So what? A movie in which incident is as spare as it is in Amour can certainly be great; a movie in which ideas and feelings are so sparse cannot.

There's another point to be made here [aside from whether movie-watching is ever simple or noncritical], namely that all the violence in "Amour" is crucial to Mr. Haneke's rigorous, liberatingly unsentimental worldview, one that gazes on death with the same benevolent equanimity as life. All of which is to say: bring hankies. This is a film that will make you weep not only because life ends but also because it blooms.

Even as Haneke follows the trajectory of his own Terms of Endearment or Away from Her(this is the hard-core version), the crisp hallmarks of his restrained style save Amour from maudlin melodrama.

If love is defined from the perspective of bourgeois, patriarchal ideology—whose teleological notion of coming (and staying) together is something that mainstream cinema inscribes into its romance plots to structure spectatorial desire (13)—Amour may be said to subvert this notion of love by virtue of the ironic overlap in the film between communion and separation, and between desire and jouissance.

In Haneke's relentlessly confrontational and unsentimental style, Amour brilliantly encapsulates the perils of aging while it simultaneously offers a profound celebration of a love that only death is able to conquer.