5 min readMay 16, 2026 11:27 AM IST
To say that Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘All Of A Sudden’ (Cannes competition) is a long film – it weighs in at a solid 3.15 hours – is stating the obvious. The Japanese auteur doesn’t do sudden – the title is a nice little touch of unintentional irony; a leisurely unfolding of events is much more his thing. In fact, he doesn’t do events either; capturing moments like no one’s looking is more like it.
Here, his deeply observant style suits the central thrust of the film, which is mainly set in a home for the elderly, where the big themes accompanying end-of-life scenarios are a natural outcome.
Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is an empathetic doctor who runs this Paris establishment, less as a hospice than a home, for those individuals who have diminished use of their faculties or have fallen in the grip of dementia. She’s just been promoted as director and is pushing for an attitude which is more people-centric rather than patient-centric, which would add more dignity and agency in dealing with patients.
It is not something mainstream cinema handles well, which tends towards saccharine and wailing violins. And here, while an outcome of a workshop run by theatre director Mari (Tao Okamoto), which encourages both the caregivers and the elderly group into a too-quick acceptance of what would be considered an airy-fairy approach towards touch-and-healing, it doesn’t take away from the focus that the film lays on its conviction that everyone has the right to lead a full life, which then leads to a happy death, if such a thing were possible.
The fact that Marie is herself a terminal cancer patient – she’s at the fourth stage, and has tried everything she could, but now is readying for an all-too-sudden decline – lends the deepening connection between the two women a pathos which is instantly moving. A night of getting to know each other through conversation – those who have had the fortune to experience this know just how magical it can be – becomes a shimmery, incandescent set, with the lights glinting on the Seine, and falling on their faces, as they get more and more immersed in each other.
It isn’t as if the establishment and its long-time employees get swept up by the idealism that holds Marie-Lou in its sway. Senior nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel) is adamant that these new-fangled ideals will lead them nowhere: what if, in their zeal to ‘allow’ patients to walk at will, leads to falls? Who will be responsible? She does thaw in the end, but there’s nothing sudden, there, that word again, about her looking at a different approach as a possibility.
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All this intense, unvarying focus on impending deaths and dying could turn dreary in the hands of a lesser director. But Hamaguchi knows exactly how much to show, and what to hold back – even if a long sequence in which Mari uses a whiteboard to give a lesson on the evils of capitalism to a bemused Marie-Lou makes you want to tell them both to hurry it up. The early introduction of a Japanese actor and his autistic grandson (beautifully played by Kodal Kurosaki) gives the film yet another chance to tell us how the profoundly disabled can show us the way, without it becoming a ‘teachable’ moment.
The film’s brief detour from Paris to a rural Japanese outpost where Mari has come for a final perch is moving without being cloying, and back in Paris, the women find themselves closer than before. That there are no sexual overtones in their relationship is clear: finally, what stays with us is the emotion that wells up when the two women are in the frame, their affection for each other lighting up the screen: both Efira and Okamoto are absolutely wonderful. As well as the conviction that a bit of warmth is what makes the difference between living and dying.
All Of A Sudden movie cast: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Kyozo Nagatsuka, Kodal Kurosaki, Jean-Charles Clichet, Marie Bunel
All Of A Sudden movie director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
All Of A Sudden movie rating: 3.5 stars
