Japanese filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi immediately became an international auteur to watch when Drive My Car won the Best International Feature Oscar and was nominated for Best Picture. However, his subsequent film, Evil Does Not Exist, came and went with critical acclaim but little fanfare. His latest film, All of a Sudden, seeks to reestablish him in that field, but feels almost too individualistic a project to fully congeal.
What is All of a Sudden about?
All of a Sudden is adapted from a nonfiction book called You and I — The Illness Suddenly Get Worse, with the film version telling the story of the manager of a care facility and a terminally ill theatre director who form a profound friendship, shaping each other’s understanding of life and care.
All of a Sudden Review
The make-or-break factor for whether you enjoy All of a Sudden will be the pacing. The film clocks in at 3 hours and 16 minutes, and it can be a bit burdensome. That’s not to say long runtimes are a bad thing — Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car was nearly three hours itself, and you didn’t feel it — but All of a Sudden suffers from feeling bloated.
This is largely because the characters are spending these 3+ hours having dense conversations about philosophy and nursing home politics. For those who have gone through the process of having a loved one in a nursing facility, this might be more interesting, but if you don’t particularly care about this topic, you may find the film to be rather boring.
Granted, this is not really what All of a Sudden is about. Yes, on its surface, it’s a movie about end-of-life care, but this is an entry point to broader conversations about empathy and our fickle existence as humans. However, if you, like this writer, cannot get invested in the surface-level text about nursing homes, you might find it difficult to really appreciate the subtext.
That being said, there are some things that everyone should be able to appreciate, not the least of which are the performances. The film’s lead is Virginie Efira (Benedetta), who is maybe better than she has ever been here (and that’s saying a lot). It’s a beautiful, humane performance, but what makes it even more impressive is that she learned Japanese to speak it for a not-insubstantial portion of her role.
Opposite her is Japanese actress Tao Okamoto (The Wolverine), whose performance is also great. Efira is the more outward performer, and thus will get more of the attention, but as a two-hander, something like this does not work if both sides are not at top form. And the fact that Okamoto manages to find unexpected light in such a sad role will not go unnoticed.
Another of the more impressive things about All of a Sudden is that it doesn’t lose the qualities of its filmmaker’s past work despite being in their non-native tongue. Even some of the best international auteurs struggle with dialogue written in other languages, but Hamaguchi’s dialogue is as poetic and poignant as ever here.
The technical aspects of the film are also stunning, with beautiful cinematography by Alan Guichaoua and a great score by Samuel Andreyev. A film like this, which spends a majority of its time just watching people talking, doesn’t need to have flashy aesthetics, but you won’t see us turning down a film that’s stunning to look at.
Is All of a Sudden worth watching?
Yet, despite the fact that it is by all accounts a well-made film — the performances are great, the visuals are strong, and the dialogue is sharp — All of a Sudden didn’t have much of an emotional impact on this writer. Although some will connect with it on a more personal level, the film’s dependence on personal connection and lived experience keeps it from ever ascending to masterpiece level like Drive My Car.
All of a Sudden premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, which runs May 12-23.
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