Monique is dying of cancer, lying in bed in the apartment above the store her family owns. Her philandering husband carries on with life, her son remains aloof, and her daughter-in-law wonders if she is witnessing her own decline. They all struggle to express, or feel, their love for one another.

Maurice Pialat never shied away from exposing the darkest corners of the human experience, and his third feature remains his most boldly confrontational. Unblinking in its surveyal of a sick woman’s final days, The Mouth Agape bears tough, unadorned witness to the realities of end-of-life care.