Instead of asking "Why might this film traffic in slow and unpleasant sequences?" or "Might there be a purpose behind the film's refusal to reveal to the viewer what the nurse did?", this review just says something extremely banal (I was bored). What's boring is this lame review.

Internet Opinion Man ... I agree with you, this review is pointless - it isn't a review of the movie so much as the critics need to criticize. Having seen the movie I can attest to its plodding timeline. Whenever someone says that they are bored I can only think that it is they who are boring. The need for titillation in a tale suggests a mind that isn't stimulated by life itself.

Yes Ms. Skinner! The movie is amazing and well-acted and I DO applaud the idea of not shying away from the fact that the topic is heartbreaking and grim in a very mundane and banal way. But it IS difficult to sit still in a chair in the dark for 2+ hours and watch so very little happen. I was simultaneously awestruck and emotionally affected AND forcing my eyeballs to stay open through sheer will because they very much wanted to sleep. If that makes me a small-minded philistine, so be it. But I walked out thinking the exact same thing as the title of this piece, and it is refreshing to hear someone say it.

If the point of the film is to say, 'this is a thing that happens.' then yes it sounds like a boring film. Does the film imbue the events on screen with any meaning? Life is realistic. Art only requires realism to the degree it facilitates meaning.

My impression of the film: it is primarily about love. The love comes embedded in domesticity, and the film shows how love in a long and happy marriage is challenged by a debilitating terminal illness. Not much “happens” in this film but the slow progression of the wife’s (carotid?) dementia and growing physical dependency. The husband has determined to see it through to the end. From that standpoint, the film is as much about him as it is about her or the illness. What’s also important is that the setting is the home, which allows us to see the end-of-life situation as a continuation of their married life together.

As it tracks the incremental stages in the wife’s decline, the film shows corresponding incremental changes in the domestic routines: husband’s help required in the bathroom, the first wheelchair, arrival of a hospital bed and regular “outside help”, spoon feeding, bedriddenness, aphasia, intravenous tubes, diapering, etc. None of this is sensationalized or sentimentalized by the director; rather, Haneke treats these as just the plain facts on the way to the exit for the dying partner. For an audience clueless about such decline, the film might be educational in this regard. For an audience geared to action films or sitcom-style pacing, all this might seem uneventful, slow, boring – but that’s perhaps a naïve response. The drama comes in enduring it all. The husband has committed to letting his wife die at home, motivated both by his love for her and by compassion. Everything he does bears the weight of this commitment.

Two questions hover in the background of this film from start to finish: How does love act (in any particular situation)? What kind of life is worth living? Seen as a love story about a couple alone and emotionally under siege by disease as the end approaches, Haneke’s reticent, straightforward telling turns out to be a strategy of understated pathos (even if his reputation for violence remains untarnished). The end when it came was a shock to me. The final answers seem desperate, sadly touching, and humane all at the same time.

Who should see this film? I saw Amour last Sunday evening. There were ten people in the theater for the late show, four of them, by my guess, 30 or younger. The rest, 50s and above. Everyone stayed to the end.