A talky, female-driven, 196-minute drama about the infinitely braided relationship between care and capitalism that’s prone to Wiseman-like meeting scenes and frequent detours into the world of avant-garde theater? It almost feels redundant to say that Ryusuke Hamaguchi has returned.
And yet, for a movie that offers such an obvious continuation of his previous work (e.g. “Drive My Car,” “Happy Hour”), the sweet and stirring “All of a Sudden” also takes Hamaguchi to places his work has never gone before. Namely: Paris, where most of the Japanese filmmaker’s latest feature is set, but also — in an abrupt, almost contrite about-face from the environmental fatalism of 2023’s “Evil Does not Exist” — a palliative realm of pure comfort.
There is much to mourn in this epic two-hander, which was inspired by the letters shared between terminal breast cancer patient Makiko Mayano and medical anthropologist Maho Isono, but few recent movies, or few movies at all, have been so rigorously insistent upon the reasons for hope. Indeed, “All of a Sudden” is centered around a scene in which the beautifully dying Mari — played by model and “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” actress Tao Okamoto, whose presence here at long last brings Hamaguchi’s films into the Snyderverse — literally diagrams the state of the world on a whiteboard. Her impromptu Ted Talk doesn’t solve for capitalism’s insatiable appetite, but it illustrates the problem with a clarity that makes a workable solution feel possible within our own lives, if maybe not in Mari’s own lifetime. And that is ultimately where Hamaguchi’s attention lies: In the pain and promise of conceding to the fact that so much is still possible for this world and its people, no matter how grim the prognosis.
In that light, it’s rather easy to appreciate why so (so) much of “All of a Sudden” is set in the memory care unit of a Paris nursing home, where the imperative for respectful treatment regularly butts up against the realities of dementia. Facility director Marie-Lou Fontaine (“Benedetta” star Virginie Efira) has made it her life’s work to reconcile those clashing forces as best as she can, but money talks, training is expensive, and the business model is biased towards the kind of care that keeps patients zombified in bed rather than encouraging them to engage with the world however they still can.
Proud of her burnout and happy to dismantle what little is left of her work/life balance (a mindset that Hamaguchi ultimately decides to support), Marie-Lou has begun the arduous process of training her staff in the ways of Humanitude, a tender but intensive French methodology that emphasizes dignity over death. While many of her colleagues support the idea in theory, even the most sympathetic among them struggle with the time and cost it has already taken to implement.
Effervescent despite its cloistered setting, much of this movie’s first hour is dedicated to the uneasy rhythms of life at the facility, where long — sometimes tempestuous — staff meetings alternate with living memorials, wherein Marie-Lou’s team works to remind their residents, their residents’ families, and themselves that even the most severe Alzheimer’s cases are still people who led full and vibrant lives. Such a pronounced decline makes it tempting to silo things into “before” and “after,” but Humanitude does what it can to stress that we all exist within a continuous “during.” Life, it maintains, persists until the moment it doesn’t. Even the most inevitable of deaths should feel as though it arrived… all of a sudden.
Despite his abiding fascination with artifice, Hamaguchi has always tended towards an unfussy aesthetic that see-saws between airy naturalism and Chekhovian melodrama, and — as if responding to the almost supernaturally heightened final moments of “Evil Does Not Exist” — “All of a Sudden” balances things back in the other direction. It would be reductive to say there’s never been less cinema in Hamaguchi’s cinema (many of the film’s more theatrical moments find a remarkable density within deceptively plain shots), but this movie, sterile by design, is very selective about how it deploys any self-insistent traces of romantic style or joie de vivre.
Which is to say that it feels like a real breath of fresh air when Marie-Lou is caught in a rainstorm after a chance encounter with a non-verbal Japanese teen named Tomoki (“Brand New Landscape” actor Kodai Kurosaki), whose grandfather Goro (a wonderful Kyōzō Nagatsuka) is in Paris to perform a one-man show about the doctor who dismantled Italy’s abusive psychiatric system. Mari is the show’s director, and — in the most breathtakingly intimate moment of a film that has a few memorable ones to choose from — she and Marie-Lou bond during a post-performance Q&A in which the two women irritate the rest of the audience by having a heart-to-heart in Japanese.
The Frenchwoman, we learn, spent time studying in Tokyo thanks to her love for Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahta (“even ‘Pom Poko!,’” she insists), and she’s instantly drawn in by Mari’s defiant attitude towards her cancer diagnosis. Goro’s show, which Tomoki interrupts whenever the mood strikes, maintains that only the dying are sensitive enough to appreciate the full scope of life’s beauty, and that message naturally resonates with the ethos of Marie-Lou’s approach to eldercare. So begins a whirlwind — and ostensibly platonic — affair between the French clinician and the Japanese director, who are soon walking along the Sienne à la “Before Sunset” and resigning themselves to the reality that work and pleasure are as inextricable from each other as late capitalism and population decline.
I’ll leave it to Mari to articulate the finer points of that argument (which she does with clarity and conviction), but the greater truth that her character allows Hamaguchi and co-writer Léa Le Dimna to postulate is that such clear separation between states of being — healthy as it might sound — makes it that much easier for l’argent to gobble them both up in its maw. “All of a Sudden” contends that there is life in work and work in life, and must be in order to prevent money from completely devaluing whatever portion of our minds and bodies that is no longer profitable. As capitalism plunders from the poor (and the natural world) in order to sustain the illusion of infinite growth, stealing from the future so as to protect the present, the conspiracy to maintain the status quo begins to exert an increasingly dehumanizing effect on those who dare to expose that everything isn’t hunky-dory after all.
The free markets have kept Mari alive for this long, but her body — like those of Marie-Lou’s patients — has become an inconvenient reminder of the fact that we’re all just one unfortunate diagnosis from being kicked out of the party. “Nowhere” and “now/here” (to use her chose terms) can’t be allowed to remain callously oppositional states. On the contrary, they have to be mixed together until the living are able to seize upon the unavoidable inevitability of death, and the dying are able to benefit from the enduring possibility of life. “Not inside and outside — we must mix everything together.”
Heady and didactic as “All of a Sudden” so obviously is, Hamaguchi makes sure to embrace that ethos in his own right. While this movie is clearly segmented into three distinct acts (and further portioned between individual days of the calendar from there), the sense that it’s alternating between institutional and human dramas rewardingly gives way to the gradual dissolution of the space between those two modes. The scenes where Marie-Lou discusses Humanitude policy with her staff are increasingly freighted with real pathos, while the scenes where she and Mari grow closer to each other begin to have a practical effect on how things are done at the nursing home.
Just how much closer to each other Mari and Marie-Lou are willing to become remains something of an open question, but so it goes in a film where the distinction between friendship and romance is no more narrowly defined than anything else. Less interesting than the “will they/won’t they” of it all is the role that desire continues to play in these women’s lives. Sex is never an especially present concern, but Okamoto’s delicate and ethereal performance might have steered toward self-actualized hokum if not for she grounds it in the suggestion that Mari is left wanting more from Marie-Lou. Enchanted but not quite magical, the character remains just on the right side of believability, which is enough to stop her illness from seeming like a teachable moment (even if Efira’s wounded stoicism allows Marie-Lou to feel like a model student).
Even so, I was more emotionally involved by the concept of what Mari comes to represent than I was by the personal stakes of her cancer diagnosis, which lent a stifling kind of vertigo to the last act of Hamaguchi’s most overtly sentimental film to date. The story climaxes with a chaotic staging of Goro’s play, one that elegantly demolishes the line between viewers and participants — among other dichotomies — in order to stress that optimism and decline aren’t opposite forces, but “All of a Sudden” is so prescriptive with its ideas that its characters are liable to become vessels for them.
It’s the one regard in which Hamaguchi’s impulse to mash everything together softens the power of his point rather than sharpening it, and the one regard in which this three-and-a-half hour sit threatens to seem too short. Marathon-like as “All of a Sudden” might be, its message resonates so deeply because of the many elisions that it refuses to make, which leave the few handful of gaps in its timeline to feel like yawning chasms.
Of course, that’s a small criticism to level against a light and lovely movie that argues for a more humane future with the same conviction that “Evil Does Not Exist” articulated the glib destructiveness of our present. “All of a Sudden” may not resolve with the same visceral force as that film, or offer the richness of feeling that “Happy Hour” and “Drive My Car” earned by their ends, but it arrives at a power all its own through how credibly it grows more hopeful as it inches towards death. It makes the impossible seem possible.
Grade: B+
“All of a Sudden” premiered in Competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. NEON will release it in theaters later this year.
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