Michael Haneke’s second Palme d’Or winner is a devastating and deeply humane exploration of age, decline and love, but it is also a harrowing account of death probing the emotional interiors of its elderly characters.

Emmanuelle Riva – the confused young lover in Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour over half a century ago – gives a truly magnificent performance as Anne, a retired piano teacher in her eighties who suffers a pair of strokes and descends into paralysis.

As the film progresses, we are given the disturbing sense of a woman being robbed of her autonomy and dignity as she puts up a futile fight against the condition which will overcome her. It’s a perfect and heart-rending performance that would be peerless in any other film, but is here accompanied by a similarly impressive performance from Jean-Louis Trintignant as Anne’s husband Georges, who attempts to remain calm while still very much in love, and is driven to the film’s inevitable and tragic end by the pain of seeing his wife slowly slip away.

Amour is necessarily bleak, but while it is precise and austere, it avoids coldness. A dispassionate static camera and naturalistic lighting make the film seem detached, while the performances and the sympathy Haneke clearly has towards his characters keeps it dramatically engaging. Far from being cold, Amour is so beautifully executed that, by a certain point, the touching of two hands can genuinely bring a tear to your eye.

Amour succeeds where many of the best films about age fail: in making the elderly, their relationship with each other, and their relationship with death its sole subjects. The film takes place almost entirely in Anne and Georges’s apartment and it is the young who invade the space of the old and frustrate their existence. Haneke divorces his narrative from the problem of intergenerational burden and instead treats his subjects in their own right.

A more compassionate film on this subject is difficult to imagine, or another film more worthy of the word ‘masterpiece’.