Austrian auteur Jessica Hausner crafts an exquisitely beautiful, disarmingly humorous and darkly romantic vision of the last days of nineteenth-century German poet Heinrich von Kleist, whose yearning for love and oblivion found fulfillment when he met the beautiful Henriette Vogel.

Berlin, the Romantic Era. Young poet Heinrich wishes to conquer the inevitability of death through love, yet is unable to convince his skeptical cousin Marie to join him in a suicide pact. It is while coming to terms with this refusal, ineffably distressed by his cousin’s insensitivity to the depth of his feelings, that Heinrich meets Henriette, the wife of a business acquaintance. Heinrich’s subsequent offer to the beguiling young woman at first holds scant appeal… until Henriette discovers she is suffering from a terminal illness. Amour Fou is a romantic comedy based loosely on the suicide of the poet Henrich von Kleist in 1811.