If you fear the aging process and aren’t remotely excited in seeing your possible future as a senior citizen writ large without any regard for your afterlife possibilities, chances are Michael Haneke’s new film Amour will be your scariest encounter of the year.

Except for the silent opening scene of one happy date night, the film is contained entirely within the spacious apartment where elderly couple Georges and Anne (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva) are finishing out their decades of wedded bliss. The first telltale sign that something is wrong occurs when one normal morning is interrupted by one abnormal moment of stupor. After we learn from a reluctant Anne about her distrust of doctors, her condition quickly progresses to a full-blown stroke that leaves her paralyzed on one side and requires Georges to transition from the role of equal partner to majority decision-maker and full-time caretaker. Subsequent days bring new forms of debilitation and add new responsibilities to Georges’ list. How can he continue to manage? Can he continue? The film asks: should he continue?

Haneke and his cinematographer Darius Khondji (who’s worked on genuine scary films with the likes of David Fincher, Roman Polanski, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet) stage the movie as a series of low-key, unedited, uninterrupted takes that let us spend several minutes at a time living naturally alongside Mr. and Mrs. No-last-name, often with the camera in a fixed, unyielding position. Though the apartment looks larger than my house in some scenes, the dim lighting, architectural positioning, and general mood of the movie turn life uncomfortable and claustrophobic, especially as Anne loses patience, bodily control, and eventually coherence. At times their humble abode feels like the world’s loneliest nursing home.

The best compliment I can give is that it really, painfully reminded me of the five years my grandmother spent in a nursing home before her passing. Her descent differed from Anne’s, but her lifestyle reminds me of the demoralizing ambiance that awaited me with each visit, and what I saw in other residents — the immobility, the moans, the aimless gazes, the surrender. The set designer especially nails the use of the nightstand as a symbol of the downward slide. At first it holds a lamp, a decoration or two, maybe a clock –the usual minor things. The more life deteriorates, the more it becomes covered in the most frequently used drugs, emergency salves, stacked papers, Kleenex new and used, etc. It’s odd to me that, after we spend a lifetime accumulating stuff and things in so many different containers, our last accumulation before our passing is restricted to whatever fits inside the perimeter of a tiny bedside table. If it isn’t stacked there, we probably don’t need it. We won’t be taking any of it with us anyway. That, to me, is the nursing home experience in a nutshell.

In terms of morality and spirituality, though, the film remains frustratingly representational of this world only. As far as Georges and Anne are concerned, this is all there is. No thoughts are shared about what, if anything, happens next. The movie is not about hope, or about any promises beyond death. We’re not even shown a glimmer of the typical Hollywood heaven where everyone north of Hitler wins and gets to spend eternity with God whether they liked Him or not while they were alive. Quite the contrary, the ultimate moral here is: whether the journey is long or short, heroic or ignominious, willing or not, everyone dies. Because, as a shrewd but wicked man once shouted at Sherlock Holmes, “That’s what people do!”

By limiting its scope to the confines of this fallen world, Amour becomes a bleak exercise in staring at the face of slowly advancing death and daring us to maintain eye contact. As we witness life alongside the couple, we do see a few examples of the impact they’ve left — their successful daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), who wants to help but is ultimately more helpless than Georges; their two offscreen grandchildren, experiencing their own trials; and a former piano student named Alexandre (real-life pianist Alexandre Tharaud), who has a healthy recording career and owes his success to Anne’s teachings. At the very least, a small sense of legacy, of accomplishments left behind in the form of those we influenced, provides the only form of redemption in sight.

Before Amour reached its inevitably grim end, I found myself in the deepest post-movie funk I’ve experienced since No Country for Old Men. Knowing that Georges and Anne had lived twice as long as I have, I was reminded that I may well be over the halfway point of my own life. If the movie was trying to depress me, it worked. If it was trying to encourage me to live more in the moment while I still can, that worked for the rest of my afternoon. If it wanted to distract me from the spiritual possibilities that lie beyond a humanist filmmaker’s self-imposed worldview limitations, at that point we part ways.

For what it’s worth, there’s no scene after the Amour end credits, though our final splash of color is a vivid collection of corporate logos for this French/German/Austrian co-production’s two dozen production studios, companies, partnerships, and other film-related entities that made all this possible. Apparently a lot of Europeans really wanted to see this movie happen.