“Are healthy people truly alive?” It is early into All of a Sudden when Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) hears the question that rings as a tagline for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new feature. The head of a private Parisian clinic for the elderly, she’s watching a play about Franco Basaglia, the Italian psychiatrist who, in the late 1970s, succeeded in his career-long mission to dismantle mental asylums, paving the way for a new, more humane way to treat “madness.” To call the performance unconventional is an understatement: the audience was handed musical instruments and instructed to play them at their leisure during the monologue, and the Japanese man delivering it in heavily accented French, Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), has brought along his grandson Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), a teenager with serious autism who likes to hop on the stage and engage with his grandfather, but only “if he thinks the show’s a good one.”
It is. So good, in fact, that while the boy plays with the props—a few chairs, a floor-to-ceiling mirror—Marie-Lou tears up. This, for her, is a revelatory moment: the center she runs, aptly titled Garden of Freedom, is unlike any other institution of its ilk. Patients aren’t treated as decaying vegetables but human beings whose cognitive decline shouldn’t prevent carers from granting them respect—never mind a few nurses and donors who antagonize Marie-Lou’s unorthodox approaches.
It is also the beginning of her life-changing relationship with the woman who staged the show, Mari (Tao Okamoto). I use the word “relationship” because friendship seems reductive: All of a Sudden spends most of its three-plus hours—of which not a minute feels wasted—to follow the two as they get close to each other over the course of a few tumultuous weeks. For all her stubbornness and unwillingness to compromise, Efira plays Marie-Lou as a something of modern-day Mother Teresa—so devoted to her job that the gig has blotted all other aspects of her life, and her selfless commitment to the cause is pushing her dangerously close to a nervous breakdown. She’s also desperately, almost unspeakably lonely, and as Mari intersects her orbit a hopeful look brushes across her face. Mari gets her—and the way Efira flickers to life as the two start roaming the streets of Paris after the show, a Before Sunrise chance encounter that spans the film’s first third, suggests maybe no one ever did. Not to such a degree, at least. But Mari is sick; she’s spent the past few years fighting breast cancer, and the doctors aren’t sure just how much she’s got left—death could catch her all of a sudden.
Yet Hamaguchi doesn’t fall for the trite tropes of terminal illness dramas, and there is something genuinely astonishing about the way his film, imbued as it is with grief, never once feels maudlin. Co-written with Léa Le Dimna and based on the epistolary book “When Life Suddenly Takes a Turn” (a series of letters between a philosopher living with metastatic breast cancer—Makiko Miyano—and a medical anthropologist—Maho Isono), it bestows as much dignity on Mari as it does on Marie-Lou’s patients. She’s not a victim at death’s door nor a pawn in someone else’s character arc, but an artist moved by an inordinate curiosity for the world around her. She’s also preternaturally astute: much of the two women’s first nightlong chat sees Mari prod Marie-Lou into discussing her university dissertation’s central dilemma—why does capitalism lead to lower birth rates?—only to pivot from that and problematize the genesis and scope of her empathy-driven approach to elderly care.
This isn’t to write off All of a Sudden as a cerebral work. Marie-Lou completed her studies in Japan—her proficiency in the language is what caught Marie’s eye and convinced her to invite her to the play when they first crossed paths on a rainy June afternoon—and at the Q&A after the show, the French woman asks Mari a question in fluent Japanese. The director answers in kind; “en français!” someone complains from the audience, and it’s Goro who declines before Mari can oblige. “To express emotions,” which the duo’s scorchingly intimate exchange from the stage teemed with, “there is nothing like one’s mother tongue,” he quips. If you’ve been keeping tabs on Hamaguchi’s oeuvre, you’ll know his interest in translation—in that impossible attempt to articulate meaning and feeling through a foreign language—has long been at the forefront of his filmography. In Drive My Car, a theater director from Tokyo, famed for his multilingual productions that let actors perform in their native tongues and viewers follow via subtitles screened in real time, traveled to Hiroshima to stage another polyglot take on Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In both films, linguistic barriers aren’t obstacles so much as an invitation to dredge up an emotional truth.
Few directors working today have so consistently and perceptively interrogated the possibilities and limits of language as the ultimate conveyor of that kind of truth, and if All of a Sudden stands as the most humanist of Hamaguchi’s features, it is because it shifts that prerogative toward the body. A film that’s full of erudite conversations—about duty of care, the dangers of capitalism, the need to dream up alternatives to the world we’ve inherited—this is, perhaps most importantly, a profoundly tactile experience. Bodies take center stage, shot by Alan Guichaoua not as decomposing chrysalises but vessels that can communicate oceans of feeling.
Hamaguchi filmed in a Parisian healthcare facility in which the crew lived during the shoot, and whose staff and residents wound up participating in the project. Once Mari moves into the Garden of Freedom, at Marie-Lou’s behest, she begins to arrange some alternative workshops that encourage patients to familiarize themselves again with their own bodies, in a kind of slow dance of hugs, rubs, and massages. And so it is that people who’ve long lost the ability to speak suddenly turn hands and feet into feelers through which they can discover and talk to each other again. Watching these moments, among the most moving, brought me back to Sarah Friedland’s Familiar Touch, another film that understood aging as a form of reawakening. Whether the healthy truly are alive, Hamaguchi doesn’t say—but it is a testament to his immensely empathetic film that, by the end, everything and everyone in All of a Sudden seems to be.
All of a Sudden premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival and will be released by NEON.