Claude agrees, but instead of returning promptly as the mice had done, he re-experiences many episodes from his past in a highly disjointed and fragmented manner, in interludes of seconds or minutes.

Claude's observations culminate in his admission – which, throughout the movie, he has frequently dismissed as a fabrication – that he had killed his morbid, sad, and terminally ill life partner, Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), painlessly by gas poisoning, upon seeing her in her sleep – for the first time in her life – completely happy and without fear.

As his mortally wounded body is carried inside by the scientists, he opens his mouth in a struggle to speak, and a single teardrop falls down his cheek.

"[10] After Kino Lorber's Blu-ray release of the film in 2015, American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, "but for better and for worse, Je t’aime je t'aime functions as a first-person narrative, even more than Resnais’ earlier Hiroshima mon amour and his later masterpiece Providence, although we may have some trouble accepting its melancholy and marginal protagonist, a sort of bureaucratic fixture whose professional identity resides in the fringes of the publishing world, as a full-fledged hero.

Instead, director Alain Resnais' film is a futuristic psychological drama and a deep dive into the disturbing nuances of a damaged relationship and the suicidal mind.