10 Greatest Movies About Death
3. Amour
Michael Haneke may be best known for his tendency to put audiences through the wringer with his rigidly detached films such as Funny Games and Caché, but his stark, Oscar-winning 2012 drama Amour employed brutal minimalism to completely devastating effect.
Amour focuses on an elderly couple, Anne (Emmanuelle Riva) and Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant), as Anne begins to decline following a stroke and Georges attempts to care for her.
What follows is a quiet, profound meditation on illness, love, and death, depicting the inevitability of human expiration in completely matter-of-fact, unsentimental fashion.
Despite the distance of Haneke's direction, the two central performances from Riva - who received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her work - and Trintignant lend total authenticity to two people attempting to reach the end of their lives with a measure of dignity.
The sobering style and tone don't make it an easy sit, and there's little comfort or succor to be found throughout, but it is as honest about the end of a person's life as cinema has ever gotten.