By Wen | EntertainLens | May 2026
All of a Sudden, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 196-minute competition entry at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, arrives carrying the weight of enormous expectations — and, more often than not, it shoulders that weight with remarkable grace. The film is Hamaguchi’s first French-language production, his first set almost entirely outside Japan, and his longest work to date. None of those distinctions fully capture what makes it exceptional and, at times, exasperating in equal measure. What defines the film is simpler and harder to quantify: it makes you feel the value of the time you are spending inside it. That is a rarer quality than it sounds.
The story draws loosely from a real book of letters — When Life Suddenly Takes a Turn: Twenty Letters Between a Philosopher with Terminal Cancer and a Medical Anthropologist by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono — but Hamaguchi, co-writing with Léa Le Dimna, has rebuilt the material entirely. He transplants it to Paris, filters it through two invented characters, and uses the correspondence’s emotional logic rather than its literal content. The result is a film that feels organic rather than adapted: rooted not in a source text but in its own accumulating consciousness.
All of a Sudden: What Hamaguchi’s Paris Looks Like
Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) runs an elder-care facility in Paris. She advocates fiercely for Humanitude, a Japanese-derived philosophy of care that insists on treating every patient as a full human being regardless of cognitive decline or physical dependency. The approach demands more time, more training, and more staff than the facility’s budget comfortably allows. Head nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel) pushes back with the weary pragmatism of someone who has watched too many reformers burn out before the paperwork clears. The institutional friction is specific and credible: this is not a cartoon bureaucracy but a functioning workplace that Hamaguchi, filming in an actual working care facility, renders with documentary patience.
Then, on a commute home, Marie-Lou pauses when she notices a young man, Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), wandering alone in a park. Tomoki has a developmental disability. She waits with him until his grandfather Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), a celebrated theater actor, arrives with his director, Mari (Tao Okamoto). The encounter is brief, but it leads to an invitation. Mari’s experimental theater production is running nearby. Marie-Lou attends. The play unsettles and inspires her. Afterwards, the two women begin talking — and don’t stop until the following morning.
The Long Conversation at the Film’s Core
This extended night of dialogue forms the spine of the film. The conversation moves between French, Japanese, and occasional English, flowing across the banks of the Seine, through the staff room of the care home, and into the early light of the next day. Hamaguchi orchestrates it with the same architectural patience he brought to the long theatrical sequences of Drive My Car. Neither woman is performing for the other. They are thinking aloud, together, in real time — and that distinction is everything.
At one point, Mari produces a whiteboard. She diagrams the structural relationship between late-stage capitalism and the collapse of care systems. It is a long sequence, lecture-adjacent, and some viewers will feel the temperature drop. The impatience is understandable. Still, it is worth staying with, because Hamaguchi is doing something specific: he is arguing that the personal and the systemic cannot be disentangled, that Marie-Lou’s exhaustion at her nursing station and Mari’s cancer diagnosis and the facility’s chronic underfunding all emerge from the same root. The whiteboard is not a digression. It is the thesis.
What Death Teaches the Living: The Film’s Emotional Architecture
Mari is in the latter stages of terminal cancer. Hamaguchi keeps this fact present without weaponizing it. The film does not pivot toward sentimentality — it stays resolutely interested in ideas, in conversation, in the texture of what it means to spend time well. When the two women eventually travel to Kyoto, where Mari intends to see out her remaining months, the film shifts register. Paris gave the story its intellectual scaffolding. Kyoto gives it something softer: morning light, instant ramen eaten on a hillside, the specific pleasure of sharing a small meal in a place that still feels inhabitable.
This is the section that earns the film’s length. The Kyoto sequences have a quality that the Paris material, for all its rigor, sometimes lacks — the sense of two lives genuinely touching, of friendship as a form of mutual transformation rather than a narrative device. It is not the finale, and the film does continue after it, adding further episodes that some viewers will feel overstay their welcome. The criticism is fair. Hamaguchi is not a director who trusts closure, and All of a Sudden ends less than it resolves, which will frustrate audiences looking for a conventional emotional payoff.
Efira and Okamoto: Why All of a Sudden Hamaguchi Needed These Two
Virginie Efira has quietly built one of the most interesting careers in contemporary European cinema, and this performance consolidates that standing. Her Marie-Lou is not a saint — she is impatient, occasionally condescending, prone to believing her own convictions more than the evidence warrants. Efira carries all of this without editorializing, trusting the audience to hold the contradiction. Tao Okamoto’s work as Mari is, if anything, even more technically demanding: she learned French for the role, speaks Japanese throughout, and finds in Mari a character whose dying does not define her. Okamoto makes Mari’s love of the world feel specific and earned rather than symbolic.
The two actors learned Japanese and French respectively for their roles. Efira’s fluency, in particular, is striking — she sustains extended scenes in Japanese with a naturalism that deflects the distraction a visible effort would create. Crucially, Hamaguchi gave them the shooting conditions to find the relationship: a two-month schedule in a working facility, real staff and real patients in the periphery of scenes, the texture of an actual institution pressing against the fiction. The production design is not design at all — it is documentation.
Care, Capitalism, and a Question the Film Refuses to Answer
The timing of this film at Cannes feels charged with contemporary urgency. Across the Western world, elder-care systems face simultaneous crises of funding, staffing, and philosophical coherence. The question of how societies treat their most vulnerable citizens — whether dignity is a luxury or a baseline — sits at the center of policy debates that most mainstream cinema ignores entirely. Hamaguchi walks straight into that argument, then refuses to simplify it. His film does not offer a political program. It offers something both more modest and more radical: the conviction that how you treat one person in front of you, right now, matters irrespective of what the system around you is doing.
That conviction extends to the film’s treatment of Tomoki, Goro’s autistic grandson. His presence punctuates the narrative without serving as symbol or lesson. He is simply there, fully inhabited by Kodai Kurosaki in a performance of exceptional sensitivity. The film’s insistence on his full humanity — unnarrated, unjustified — is itself an expression of the Humanitude philosophy it describes. Hamaguchi doesn’t explain the parallel. He trusts the audience to feel it.
How the Film Sits Within Hamaguchi’s Career
After Drive My Car won the Academy Award for Best International Feature and drew nominations for Best Picture, Director, and Adapted Screenplay — the only Japanese film to achieve that — the critical expectations attached to Hamaguchi’s name became both his strongest asset and his most significant burden. Evil Does Not Exist (2023) handled that pressure by going smaller, quieter, and more opaque. All of a Sudden handles it by going larger, which produces a different kind of vulnerability. A three-hour-plus film about eldercare and conversation invites impatience in a way a tighter work might deflect.
The film is, consequently, Hamaguchi’s most divisive work since the pre-Cannes phase of his career. Critical reception at this year’s festival has ranged from rhapsodic to respectful-but-reserved, with the film’s extended running time and its willingness to let ideas overtake drama drawing both admiration and fatigue in equal measure. Distributor Neon faces a real commercial challenge in positioning a 196-minute art-house drama about French institutional failure to an American audience. The challenge is real. So is the film.
All of a Sudden Hamaguchi: The Verdict
Not every sequence justifies itself. The film’s third act adds episodes that feel less like continuation than reluctance to let go — a quality Hamaguchi shares with his characters, and not entirely as a flaw. The pacing tests even sympathetic viewers. The whiteboard sequence will lose some audiences entirely and they will not be wrong to leave. Nevertheless, the film at its best achieves something unusual: it makes care feel like an intellectual position, and it makes ideas feel like intimacy. When Marie-Lou and Mari share a meal in Kyoto, discussing the comparative merits of firm noodles while the landscape opens behind them, the film briefly touches something that justifies its entire length.
Hamaguchi has made a film that mirrors its own subject. Humanitude, the care philosophy at the center of the story, holds that every person deserves to be treated as irreducibly themselves — that no system, no staffing shortage, no cognitive decline erases the individual in front of you. All of a Sudden practices that philosophy on its audience. It gives you three hours and sixteen minutes of two women being entirely themselves, on screen, together. Whether that feels like a gift or a test will depend entirely on the viewer. For this one, it felt like both — and the gift outweighed the test.
Enjoyed This Story? Subscribe to EntertainLens for more entertainment insights.
