I watched Amour alone in my apartment on a Tuesday night, and I had to pause it three times because I couldn’t stop crying.
This is not a film about love in the way we usually think about it. There are no grand gestures, no passionate declarations, no romantic moments. This is love as endurance. Love as duty. Love as watching someone you’ve spent your entire life with slowly disappear in front of you.
Georges and Anne are an elderly couple—retired music teachers, cultured, comfortable. The film opens with them at a concert, holding hands. And then Anne has a stroke. And everything changes.
What follows is the most unflinching, unsentimental portrait of aging and illness I’ve ever seen. Haneke doesn’t look away from anything. We watch Anne lose her ability to speak, to move, to control her body. We watch Georges—this dignified, gentle man—become her caretaker, her nurse, her prisoner.
There’s a scene where he’s trying to feed her, and she won’t open her mouth. He’s pleading with her, getting frustrated, and finally he slaps her. Just once. And then he immediately breaks down, horrified at himself. I had to pause the film there. Because that moment is so real, so human, so far from the sanitized version of caregiving we usually see in movies.
This is what love looks like when it’s stripped of everything romantic, everything easy. It’s changing diapers. It’s cleaning up messes. It’s trying to maintain someone’s dignity when their body has betrayed them. It’s the exhaustion, the resentment, the guilt about the resentment. It’s staying when every part of you wants to run.
The film’s ending is controversial, and I won’t spoil it. But I will say that it forced me to think about questions I didn’t want to think about. What do we owe the people we love? How far does our duty extend? At what point does keeping someone alive become cruelty?
I thought about my own parents while watching this. They’re still healthy, still independent. But someday they won’t be. Someday, I might be in Georges’s position. And what will I do? Will I have his strength? His patience? His love?
After the film ended, I called my mom. Just to hear her voice. Just to tell her I love her. She asked if I was okay, because I sounded strange. I told her I’d just watched a sad movie. I didn’t tell her it was about her future, about my future, about the inevitable end that’s waiting for all of us.
Amour is not an easy watch. It’s slow, it’s painful, it offers no comfort. But it’s also one of the most honest films ever made about what it means to love someone through the worst parts of life. Not the romantic parts. The hard parts. The parts we don’t want to think about until we have to.
I’m glad I watched it. But I don’t think I can watch it again. Once was enough. Once was almost too much.
