The characters have achieved a state of emotional and spiritual grace. They seem cut adrift from their histories, alien to their environment, and unaffected by the world beyond their own. The son brushes the mother's hair, wraps her blanket more tightly around her, feeds her with a teated bottle. It is a relationship, in a sense, that is not meant to be seen. It is sacred, religious, uncomplicated by any prurient intrusions of 20th-century analysis.
Death hangs heavy over everything, saddening each gesture, weighing down each action.
Even the landscape appears to be in mourning for the mother's imminent demise. The dialogue, too, seems strangely ineffectual, as if the protagonists' love and understanding has rendered language unnecessary. When they do converse, their words seem to lack any true purpose. They neither comfort or clarify, for all is said in the knowledge that exists within each gesture. There is psychology in words, there is complication and pain.