Georges and Anne, a Parisian couple in their eighties, are at breakfast, talking amicably and intelligently. All of a sudden, Anne falls silent. For a few long moments, she seems to have vanished and left her body behind. Her husband, distraught but calm, tries everything to get a reaction from her: he waves his hand, questions her repeatedly, daubs water on her. Nothing. Only when he hurries off to change out of his pajamas and get help does she revive, just as suddenly as she blanked out. She has no memory of what happened and has to be convinced, in fact, that anything happened at all. This sequence occurs a few minutes into Michael Haneke’s “Amour,” and is a clue to the question at the heart of this masterful film: What does it mean when someone—particularly someone vital and beloved—becomes no one?

Haneke is rightly celebrated as one of the best filmmakers now at work. In film after film, he explores violence, prejudice, eroticism, loss, and fear in ways that seem to transcend cinema’s limitations. He likes to shock, it’s true, but his serious engagement with fundamental questions gives his work a bracing quality that links it less to the work of his contemporaries than to that of an earlier generation of auteurs. “Amour,” like Haneke’s previous film “The White Ribbon” (2009), won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Both were deserving of the accolade, but what is striking is how different they are. “The White Ribbon” is a polyphonic historical drama shot in gorgeous black and white in a rural German setting. It is a big film. “Amour,” on the other hand, is small, and looks almost like the work of a different filmmaker. Its action is confined almost entirely to a single Paris apartment, and its characters are few. Georges (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who is eighty-two) and Anne (Emmanuelle Riva, eighty-five) take up the bulk of the screen time, and their dialogue feels circumscribed, as though written for the stage. Haneke’s films tend to have a hectoring emotional intensity, and an atmosphere of menace, which can occasionally edge into sadism, suffuses films like “Funny Games,” “Code: Unknown,” “The Piano Teacher,” and “Caché.” This is much less true of “Amour,” which unfolds like a simple domestic drama. We see the lives and daily rituals of a pair of retired piano teachers. One of them has had a stroke, and the other cares for her. It is sad, but it isn’t vicious or unsettling. At moments, with its steady camera gaze, repetitive domestic chores, and tiny kitchen, “Amour” evokes Chantal Akermann’s radical 1975 study of tedium, “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles.” At other times, the tenderness between Georges and Anne brings to mind tastefully-made films of decline like Sarah Polley’s “Away From Her.” But this is Haneke. We suspect and fear that he won’t keep up either the tastefulness or the tedium for very long.

“When we look at the image of our own future provided by the old we do not believe it: an absurd inner voice whispers that that will never happen to us—when that happens it will no longer be ourselves that it happens to.” Thus did Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Coming of Age” address the fundamental disbelief with which we regard old age. It is something that happens, that is certain, but it only happens to other people. In “Amour,” Haneke shows us that this disbelief remains even for those who are no longer young. One is intact to oneself, and the certainty of one’s radical diminishment is hard to credit.

Georges and Anne are distinguished by their acuity; Anne, in fact, is the sharper, more acid-tongued, and more attractive of the two. It is the contrast between this sharpness and its sudden vertiginous loss that frightens. Not long after her blank moment in the kitchen, she has an unsuccessful operation and becomes bedridden. Before long, dementia sets in. Georges insists on being her primary caretaker, and their lives become purely physical: eating, excreting, cleaning, sleeping. Anne often cries out in pain—helpless and wounded cries that Georges struggles to parse—and these are among the most harrowing sequences in the film. Cinema has its settled conventions about physical candor, most of them unrealistic. When, in one scene in “Amour,” we see Anne’s aged body being bathed, the naked body of a woman in her eighties, it is a terrible and original moment, at once dignified and totally lacking in dignity. This is Haneke at his realistic and unsentimental best.

Georges and Anne’s grown daughter Eva (played by Isabelle Huppert), high-strung and selfish, cleverly distances herself from this day-to-day horror, but then demands her father tell her “what happens now.” Georges says what we often think but seldom say in such situations: “What happens now is what has happened until now. Then it will go steadily downhill and it will be over.” This plain truth is also a piece of misdirection. We are meant to suppose we know what “downhill” might mean; but we don’t know, not really. Yet to come are further terrors, more loneliness, more pointless pain, all of which come in bursts, striking the family more or less harshly than expected. These are predictable things, but the suffering they cause is worsened because they happen in a wildly unpredictable sequence.

There are brief moments of diegetic music in the film, Schubert’s Impromptus and Beethoven’s Bagatelles, which, when they come, feel like a small mercy, but mostly we are left in silence, and with the sounds of apartment life: chairs being moved, silverware clinking on plates, taps running, feet shuffling, unhappy human voices. “Every life is in many days, day after day,” Joyce wrote in “Ulysses,” and Haneke shows how implacably difficult the last of those days can be. Even when the end is certain, the days must be lived, and little can be done to hurry things along. To express such things well in a film, to express them in a humane and unflinching way, to resist the temptation to entertain or soothe, to keep the film as arid as the material, as Haneke has done in “Amour,” is to provide some very small but indispensible comfort. This is not about the high tone of the work—the Schubert, the understated Parisian knowingness, the ironic repartee—for in a film as different from this one as Asghar Farhadi’s“A Separation,” with a wholly different set of cultural codes, a similar kind of consolation exists. It is more a matter of a willingness to push past the clichés of representation into a zone of discomfort so specific that it achieves universality. The temptation for many filmmakers is to console too soon, or to console in the wrong ways; to encounter those who give us some fresh and necessarily unpretty version of “how it is” can be a tremendous relief.

The question then is whether “Amour” is one of those films that one urges everyone to see. I don’t think so. It’s difficult to place it as a product; it’s too troubling and bruising to be a nice night out at the movies. You wouldn’t want to watch it after dinner, nor would you want to go to dinner after watching it. But it is undoubtedly the kind of film that will find its viewers, and that will long continue to trouble them in the right ways. For hours after I saw it and, intermittently, for days afterwards, I could not shake the world and truths it conveyed.

At one moment, after Georges slaps Anne, the camera cuts away from the aggrieved characters. It comes to rest on the paintings on the wall of the apartment. This goes on for slightly longer than we expect. We look at the indistinct details of figures in a landscape. The paintings are not remarkable, but they are a respite, showing us scenes where fate is settled, an Arcadian escape from the tyranny of time. It’s a glimpse of what will happen when it’s all over, which is to say: nothing.

Teju Cole is a photographer and writer. His novel “Open City” was published last year. Read his previous pieces on an encounter with V.S. Naipaul and travelling in Sebald-land.