Following up Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and his Oscar-winning Drive My Car with Evil Does Not Exist, which was shot in secret, more info is coming together for Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s next feature, All of a Sudden. The French production, starring Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, landed at the top spot in our 100 most-anticipated films of 2026, and now the first image has arrived.
With sales kicking off at Berlinale’s European Film Market, Variety has debuted the first image for the French-language film that draws inspiration from real-life letters in Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono’s book “You and I – The Illness Suddenly Get Worse.” Likely gearing up for a Cannes debut, the film reportedly clocks in around three hours and features a score by Canadian-French composer Samuel Andreyev.
Here’s the synopsis: “All of a Sudden stars Virginie Efira as Marie-Lou Fontaine, a director of a nursing home in the Paris suburbs, who defies convention by adopting the ‘Humanitude’ method despite her team’s resistance. Her encounter with Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a terminally ill Japanese playwright, transforms her life. Together, they turn the facility into a symbol of resistance and humanity against the system’s limits. Efira learned Japanese for the part.”
See the first still below.
