Icons of French cinema Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva play an elderly couple facing final separation by cruel death in Haneke’s tender-yet-hard study of life at the precipice. Cinematographer Darius Khondji offers a litany of locked-down framings, brittle in their composed beauty, each marked by an elegant exactitude and slowly suffocating airlessness, while editor Monika Willi’s smooth, sure-handed cutting lends what otherwise might be a stultifyingly static work a feeling of grim, merciless momentum, sliding imperceptibly towards the Great Beyond. Perhaps Haneke’s ultimate directorial accomplishment—and, incidentally, a eulogy for the youthful dreams of the 1960s European art cinema.

Q&A with editor Monika Willi on Friday, March 28th