10 Saddest Character Deaths In Movie History
4. Anne Laurent - Amour
Michael Haneke is one of the last directors you'd expect to make you feel an overwhelming surge of sadness. Far from being a filmmaker concerned with melodrama, if anything he is the anti-emotional director whose movies quite deliberately sap the audience's collective humanity until all that is left is a cold, detached objectivity.
That may well have been the case for films like Funny Games and The White Ribbon, but Haneke's exceptional Academy Award winner Amour went beyond simply proving that the typically nihilistic Austrian actually has a heart. Set almost entirely within the walls of their apartment, Amour charts the decline in health of elderly Anne Laurent (Emmanuelle Riva) as her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) deals with her imminent passing.
If you're looking for an intense, deeply moving and thought-provoking film about the ravages of mortality - and the humanity which comes out of those affected by death's imminence - then Amour is as powerful as they come. Anne's final moment with her devoted husband, filmed in a long take and an immobile shot, is devastating to watch.