Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi loves experimental theatre almost as much as he loves a tender female friendship. In All Of A Sudden (loosely based on the book You And I—The Illness Suddenly Gets Worse by Maho Isono and Makiko Miyano), he weds the two in a delicate, transcendent union that chronicles the chasm between past and future, capitalism and freedom, the possible and the impossible. What does it look like to treat the powerless and voiceless in society like people with souls? Mari and Marie-Lou have a few ideas.
Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira) is the director of Garden Of Freedom, a nursing home in Paris where she’s convinced the revenue-forward backers of the franchised homes to let her try something different: Humanitude—an approach to elderly care that radically humanizes those without the mental acuity to take care of themselves. Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto) is an avant-garde theatre director helming a play called “Up Close, No One Is Normal.” The Paris-born Marie-Lou studied anthropology in Japan before she took a sharp left turn into her current career, while the Kyoto-born Mari studied philosophy in Paris before doing the same.
After Marie-Lou comes across a boy with severe autism named Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki) running next to a bus she’s riding, she gets off to lead him to safety, afraid he might get hit by a car. She finds a tracking device in his pocket and keeps him company until someone arrives. Enter: Mari and the only actor in her one-man play, Tomoki’s 75-year-old grandfather Goro (Kyôzô Nagatsuka), relieved to find Tomoki in good care. Mari invites Marie-Lou to the play, Marie-Lou attends, and a beautiful, unexpected friendship blossoms over a long night that bleeds into the morning.
Much like Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, All Of A Sudden is the rare film that earns its three-hour runtime. At the very beginning of the first night, the stage is set: Mari tells Marie-Lou (in front of a live audience) that she has late-stage cancer and only a short while left to live, a situation that renders every moment between the two more salient, every line weighted with an existential gravity that makes the hours into gifts. (“Some things we desire elude us. Others are handed to us when we least expect it,” Mari says with a soft smile.)
They talk through the moonlit night in sharp, tranquil excavations of the messiest and most unwieldy of topics—the democratic ideal as it relates to city versus countryside living, as it relates to the demands of capitalism, as it relates to the here and now, as it relates to nature, as it relates to the body, as it relates to time, as it relates to demographic decline, and so on—with a sage-like wisdom, never stepping on each others’ words, carefully considering and appreciating the other’s contribution before responding. It’s as if there’d been a mutual respect maturing between them for decades.
Despite what it might seem, the Mari(e)s’ relationship isn’t romantic, but that doesn’t stop them from spending every waking moment together over the coming days. The two switch back and forth in a fluid exchange of Japanese and French as they become the most important people in each others’ lives. Both are clear-spoken, calm, devoted, and kind. They witness each other work with awe and graciously participate, Hamaguchi drawing out the selflessness of the two, which they imminently bond over.
Hamaguchi’s screenplay for his first French film (co-written with Léa Le Dimna) overflows with insight and discernment at such great depth that it’s more like the Tao Te Ching than a script, more like a film by the Dalai Lama than an internationally beloved auteur. Likewise, his delicate, galvanizing direction continues a streak of excellence that began with 2015’s Happy Hour and has seen four 21st century-topping features since (Asako I & II, Wheel Of Fortune And Fantasy, Drive My Car, and Evil Does Not Exist).
Take, for instance, a sequence in which the Mari(e)s walk down a seemingly infinite staircase that extends in all directions, the camera slowly gliding by and twisting back toward them to capture the banal act as if it were angelic, gleaming skyscrapers hovering above them and changing shape with the camera’s movement. Or, a sequence that begins in disaster and ends in a serene cross-generational massage puddle that’s heightened by the narrative context and the immaculately hushed sound design: softly blowing wind, lightly dancing leaves, chirping birds, and a brisk, sporadic percussion section consisting of triangles dinging, tambourines quietly shaking, and wooden blocks ticked and tacked to the unpredictable patterns of nature.
Though he’s had multiple films in competition at Cannes, Hamaguchi has yet to win a Palme d’Or, something that borders on the impossible for most filmmakers, an achievement they could only ever fleetingly dream of. But, as Mari tells Marie-Lou at the very beginning of their friendship, the impossible is not possible until we discover the path from the former to the latter and realize it was there all along—that the impossible was always possible. As the clear frontrunner for the Palme d’Or at the midpoint of the festival, Hamaguchi may have found his path.
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Writer: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Léa Le Dimna
Starring: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Kyōzō Nagatsuka
Release Date: May 15, 2026 (Cannes)
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