Amour Fou
Film Movement | Release Date: March 18, 2015 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
69
METASCORE
Generally favorable reviews based on 15 Critic Reviews
Positive:
11
Mixed:
4
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
RogerEbert.comScout TafoyaMar 20, 2015
Amour fou, has gone some of the way towards correcting the historical imbalance of interest in the suicide pact. She’s taken liberties with the facts of the case for dramatic effect, but also because two centuries is a long time to go without someone wondering whether Vogel being shot point blank in the chest was entirely consensual. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineJames LattimerMar 15, 2015
Jessica Hausner is less interested in historical revisionism than mining this real-life tragedy for its existential thrust. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubA.A. Dowd Mar 17, 2015
The artificiality is funny but also thematically resonant: This is a film about fake feelings, the invented romance for which two strangers forfeited their futures. And to Hausner, such a colossal waste of potential deserves not a melodramatic tribute, but the cinematic equivalent of an eye-roll. Read full review
80
The Hollywood ReporterBoyd van HoeijMar 17, 2015
What’s finally tragic about their destiny of choice is not that the couple succeeded in becoming immortal together but that everything leading up to their death was the result of very banal actions and shot through with an extreme sense of loneliness. Read full review
80
VarietyJustin ChangMar 17, 2015
The Austrian writer-director gradually locates the emotional pulse in a picture that plays less like a doomed romance than a seriocomic anatomy of one, subjecting its characters and their bubble of high privilege to sharply critical yet quietly affecting scrutiny. Read full review
80
Time OutKeith UhlichMar 17, 2015
One thing’s certain: This is no swoony love story. It intoxicates all the same. Read full review
80
EmpireDavid ParkinsonFeb 2, 2015
A daring, dark satire strewn with allusions to modern times. Read full review
75
New York PostSara StewartMar 18, 2015
The very German lack of emotion is so acute it can be hard to tell when Hausner’s playing for laughs, but Friedel is hilariously — if morbidly — tedious as the tortured writer whose pickup line is, “Would you care to die with me?” Read full review
75
The PlaylistNikola GrozdanovicMar 17, 2015
What makes Amour Fou a fascinating, if at times frustratingly idle experience, is that it seems to be saying so much with its upfront style, injections of black humor, and focus on stifled feminine disposition, yet still feels disappointingly unresponsive when mulling it over in your head. Read full review
70
The New York TimesManohla DargisMar 17, 2015
it can be a strategically off-putting movie yet one that also steals under your skin scene by scene and through Ms. Schnoeink’s slowly revealing performance as an ill-fated heroine turned future biographical footnote. Read full review
70
Village VoiceMelissa AndersonMar 17, 2015
Henriette's last thought will forever be a mystery, but the grandeur of Romanticism is tartly, pleasingly demystified. Read full review
60
The GuardianPeter BradshawMar 17, 2015
It is a strange, clenched movie: weirdly compelling, with an undertone of absurdity worthy of Woody Allen’s Love and Death. Read full review
50
Los Angeles TimesGary GoldsteinMar 20, 2015
That writer-director Jessica Hausner moves things along at such a glacial pace and fills her velvety frames with the equivalent of museum-quality oil paintings instead of with living, breathing humanity, only adds to the film's turgid quality. Read full review
50
The New YorkerRichard BrodyMar 17, 2015
The director looks empathetically at lives of convention and duty that stifle romance and desire, but she reduces the fiery literary lovers to ciphers. Read full review
50
The DissolveMike D'AngeloMar 17, 2015
Hausner’s previous feature, Lourdes, was sometimes frustratingly opaque, but at least it had a discernible pulse. Here, she seems more interested in period décor and symmetrical compositions than in Kleist, Vogel, or any of the ideas they espouse and/or embody. Her impressive formalism is hollow. Read full review
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