All of a Sudden: Hamaguchi questions philosophies of care in a radically tender and enriching drama

• Reviewed from the 2026 Cannes Film Festival

The recent films of Hamaguchi Ryusuke don’t pretend that the challenges facing us – whether as individuals or as a planet – are easy to overcome or weather. But he’s deeply invested in mapping out ways in which human connection could sustain us (even as he recognises the mysterious motivations that can keep us from doing so). All of a Sudden might be his summa in this regard (at least, so far), a multilingual movie watching the friendship between a nursing home director and a playwright bloom with a thoughtful tenderness borne largely out of that most radical of things: dialogue. 

Care is the film’s explicit concern from its outset, opening in a Paris home for the elderly where newly appointed head Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is training the staff in the tenets of “humanitude.” What might sound (to American ears, perhaps) like the latest bit of hollow healthcare branding emerges as a sincere ethos of treatment. Nurses bestow residents, many in advanced stages of dementia, with direct, conversational attention and eye-to-eye engagement, in direct opposition to the usual perfunctory practices that prize low staff overhead and efficiency above all. Shadowing the teams in training (and according to press notes shooting in an actual facility), it’s as if Hamaguchi has parachuted into a French medical drama. 

Then Marie-Lou (who sleeps in a residence on campus and dresses with resolute neutrality) has a couple of encounters that open out her world. She steps in to help an autistic adolescent, Tomoki (Kurosaki Kodai), who’s gone astray from his family, and meets a Japanese artist, Mari (Okamoto Tao), who invites her to a play she’s staging. The piece stars Goro (Nagatsuka Kyozo), Tomoki’s grandfather, in a meditation on asylums that blurs the boundary between stage and audience. (It’s inspired by texts by a Japanese researcher into the work of Italian psychiatrist and disability advocate Franco Basaglia, much as Hamaguchi’s screenplay with Léa Le Dimna draws on a book of letters between an anthropologist and a philosopher with cancer). 

Mari strikes up a friendship with Marie-Lou, each recognising a simpatico soul, drawing out long walks by the Seine, and hanging out at the eldercare facility with the abandon of two students having late-night heart to hearts. At this point it might truly mystify some viewers to see a movie taking the time to build out the house of its world, as it were, brick by brick, without surging into any of a few hovering story prospects: the grave illness that Mari reveals to Marie-Lou, the ongoing frustrations of Marie-Lou’s re-training of her workplace (especially a stubborn old-school nurse named Sophie, played by Marie Bunel), or even the precise nature of the rapidly formed bond between the two women. 

But Hamaguchi is focused on a sustained portrayal of friendship and communion developing between them. He gives the characters the time they need (over three hours, in fact): a sweetly matched pair, differently disarming, but with Mari lending a creative spark to Marie-Lou’s somewhat stolid restraint. Their conversations and their compassion lead them to consider the whole world, including a (much-cited at Cannes) whiteboard explanation by Mari that charts the world’s vicious cycles under capitalism, a daunting demonstration of relentless and flawed systems, to which their friendship comes to seem one kind of bulwark against helpless decline.  

And so Hamaguchi cultivates constructive philosophies of living just as he models alternative, enriching ways of making movies. None of which would function without his own mighty talents in directing and staging, whether it is the subtle circling variations in Mari and Marie-Lou’s encounters that express their growing intimacy, or the burgeoning sense of community and routine at the eldercare home, where residents naturally adopt an almost comically automatic regimen of giving one another foot massages to work through stressful situations, like cats preening one another. Almost comical, and yet this ethos of touch does serve to soothe and connect. 

In recent years, a Hemingway quotation keeps surfacing, reapplied to a 21st-century world on the edge: “How did you go bankrupt? Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.” The notion could describe how Mari’s doctors warn her that her cancer might take a precipitous turn for the worse (which in turn leads to a passage in Kyoto). But it could also describe the salutary momentum of All of a Sudden, which builds slowly, then crystallises into something that can change your understanding of what’s possible on screen and off.