Everyone gets to vote for the TIFF People’s Choice Award, even the press. And while I can’t reveal some personal award votes later in the season, I can safely tell you my pick this one time. I voted for Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Franco-Japanese production of All of a Sudden. The best film at TIFF, it’s also my favorite world premiere so far into 2026, a masterpiece that feels like a return to basics for a director whose early works owed much to the likes of Antonioni and Rohmer. Well, a return to basics that also runs over three hours long and contains some of the most direct discussions of Marxist theory you’ll see in a film, of this or any year. But please, don’t get apprehensive when you read those words. For all the putative intellectualism coursing through its veins, All of a Sudden is a deeply humanistic, even accessible, text that should have something to say to, and resonate with, almost every viewer out there.
I confess that, as the end credits rolled, I hurried out of the TIFF Lightbox screening room, missing Virginie Efira’s Q&A because the tears streaming down my face were too much. In that moment, I needed time and a bit of privacy to compose myself. Since then, I’ve been trying to organize my thoughts on this breathtaking picture and can only hope to do it justice in my review. If I fail to communicate its brilliance, be assured it’s my fault and not the film’s…
Adapted from Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono’s non-fiction epistolary book, You and I – The Illness Suddenly Get Worse, this year’s Cannes Best Actress (double) victor starts in the same place where it’ll spend most of its epic runtime. We’re in a nursing home for the elderly and the infirm, somewhere in the Parisian suburbs. As we arrive, the camera lets us watch a group of employees, some old and some new, go through training. Impeccably blocked compositions that don’t call attention to themselves allow us to understand and be taught care as a way of recognizing someone else’s humanity rather than deny it in the name of efficiency. If not for Efira’s familiar presence, one could confuse this opening and the ensuing staff meeting - one of many to come - for a rediscovered Frederick Wiseman documentary released after the master’s death.
But it isn’t so. And the apparent idyll of this facility is but a thin veil of peace over internal conflicts that spread in every direction. The program we see at the film’s start is a new development, named Humanitude, spearheaded, in this particular home, by a caregiver who’s recently been promoted to its director – Efira’s Marie. Her leadership isn’t met with frictionless acquiescence or even polite acceptance from everyone, causing rifts among the staff, as some old-school nurses see these newfangled ideas as both an impediment to their duties and a personal offense. For what is this if not questioning what they’ve been doing all their careers, accusing them of uncaring for their past and present patients? It’s presented as an educational opportunity, it feels like a slap.
The higher-ups have their own reservations. In the long run, Humanitude has been proven to increase efficiency and an establishment's reputation, increasing its value for prospective clients, workers, and shareholders alike. However, short-term results don’t satisfy the money men quite as much as they should. Moreover, these financing issues carry down to the staff. Wages are so low that Marie has started an initiative that would see the laborers cohabitate with their patients, taking on empty rooms as their own and saving on the growing cost of living. Some young workers, initially inspired by Humanitude, feel disillusioned with their meager pay and the old guard’s resistance to change, so they’re ready to jump ship and start small care homes of their own.
Pressure is building, and for Marie, burnout seems inevitable. In this, we’re asked to reflect upon another level of care – the one we apply to ourselves, our own needs, our well-being. And how is the duty of care for oneself connected to the duty of care for others? In the pits of exhaustion tainted by grief, it’s not easy to weigh such things or come to rational conclusions, if those are even possible in the first place. Such is Marie’s private hell. Then, one afternoon, while taking the bus back home, she, whose constant awareness of those around her has been imbued into every aspect of Efira’s performance, glimpses a kid running wild by the park. Recognizing a vulnerable minor with a cognitive disability and the need for aid, she gets off the bus. She calms the adolescent and waits for the arrival of whoever his location device is alerting.
This serendipitous meeting brings Marie together with Mari (Tao Okamoto), a director herself. Rather than taking over a nursing home, she directs and writes plays, currently presenting her latest work to Parisian audiences as part of a world tour. The boy is Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), the quasi-non-verbal autistic grandson of Mari’s leading man and only actor, Goro (Kyōzō Nagatsuka). It’s a one-man show, you see, performed in Japanese with live French subtitles while telling the story of an Italian pioneer who helped in the dissolution of the madhouses where society used to segregate those who, like Tomoki, couldn’t fit the behavioral mold that was expected of them. It’s always done for one’s best interest, or so they say. But is it, really? Or are we putting the collective comfort of the majority above the needs of the minority, those most in need?
Throughout Mari’s show, the audience is invited to chime in with instruments distributed beforehand, pulled from their complacency into an active dialogue with the experience on stage. Barriers built on prosceniums and centuries-old convention are further demolished by Tomoki’s presence, always unpredictable. Sometimes he invades the stage. Sometimes he remains absent. When Marie sees the show, he makes himself seen and heard, an active part of the experience, just like he should be allowed to be an active participant in society. As someone with friends working on theater projects focused on reaching and including the disabled community, and as the uncle of a boy much like Tomoki, I can’t tell you how moved I was to see these realities on screen.
Even then, I couldn’t have been as shaken as Marie, who, when it comes time for those dreaded Q&As between an artist and their audience, surprises everyone by addressing Mari in Japanese. She needs answers. She needs to know how to make the miracles of the past work again, how to implement positive change and, in Mari’s own words, make the impossible possible. What starts as a public forum becomes a private conversation and, for the first time, the theater director admits what she has, so far, only let her closest collaborators know. Mari is dying. Terminal cancer has eaten away at her for a long time, and though she’s stable now, at any moment, the situation might change, leading to a quick deterioration before the end. All of a sudden, she’ll be here and then she won’t.
From what you’ve seen of trailers and official stills, early reactions and whatnot, you’ll know the two women spend the night stretching that dialogue right until dawn’s first light breaks the horizon. The theater gives way to the streets, the buzzing vitality of folks congregating by the River Seine and, as it was always meant to be, the nursing home, where Marie is called to fill in a shift for an absent employee. Within the bounds of her domain, the French woman explains her plans and roadblocks to this new Japanese friend. In return, Mari tries to make sense of these dilemmas by appealing to Marxist thought they’re both familiar with from past academic careers, dissecting the failings of a capitalist system where things only ever work now and here, and only for a very limited time. Inevitably, now and here become nowhere.
Yes, this is that (in)famous scene, when Hamaguchi has his characters pull out a literal whiteboard and explain the world order through a handy English-language graphic on matters of exploitation, pyramids of power and inter-class resentment. Though I ascribe to much of the theoretical frameworks on display, I can understand why some feel turned off by All of a Sudden’s turn to what seems like blunt didacticism. But I’ll ask you to consider this through what it means for the characters in the scene. For what it can mean as dramaturgy. In essence, isn’t this what you’d expect from Mari, a Philosopher major from the Sorbonne turned playwright, and Marie, an Anthropologist who did her studies in Japan before her mother’s declining health shifted her priorities to a career in palliative care of the elderly?
We don’t have to think much, since All of a Sudden, though fictionalized, is based on the real-life exchange between women in these same fields, with similar backgrounds and conclusions. Furthermore, the point of the scene isn’t to beatify two people who, by this point in the evening, are starting to feel like hyperreal reflections of one another. Instead, the moment pushes them forward. Mari describes all these injustices yet can’t help but admit how much solace she’s found in the system, her work in the arts based upon capital and the democratic powers it sustains. For Marie, it’s about realizing her limits and hypocrisies, matters of condescension to stubborn nurses and outright disrespect, all while failing to acknowledge the privilege and, by consequence, the exploitation needed for her idealism to enact material change in the world.
Because, like Mari’s play or later presentations where residents and staff will play-act a talk show to share their life experience and provide insight, foment empathy between separate in-groups, All of a Sudden isn’t a lecture. It’s a conversation. One it wants you to take part in, even if you don’t have a musical instrument in hand to complement the film’s soundtrack in the same style as Mari’s audiences. Story-wise, I won’t reveal much more beyond the obvious. The artist suddenly gets worse, and Marie brings her friend into her home mid-revolution. Indeed, she makes Mari part of the campaign for change. Because care isn’t a mercy but a necessity that shouldn’t be contingent on profit, or systems that value numbers above people and, in doing so, make all of us a little less human. Care is a duty to the fellow man, what preserves our humanity when all else is lost. Care is hope.
And All of a Sudden is nothing if not a source of hope. I’ve already mentioned how much it made me cry, how it beckoned me to identify with the work of close friends and the difficult realities of beloved family members. But I should further explain the feeling of hopelessness that has taken over me as of late. I look around, and I see a world crumbling, evils accumulated for millennia bearing down on us while the problems we’ve consciously suffered from for forever become ever more difficult to endure. Yet, in Marie and Mari, and in Hamaguchi’s storytelling, I could feel the blossom of hope sprouting from soil I thought barren, filling me with warmth that’s more shocking than any misanthropy or empty provocation. In its earnest plea, All of a Sudden opened a door of possibility where, before, stood a giant, featureless wall named “impossible.”
It doesn’t achieve this merely through its leftist rhetoric, its idealism as articulated through character study or even through the performances of a cast that could not be improved. Efira has hardly ever been better despite the role’s restraint, while Okamoto delineates a journey in body, spirit and sentiment that feels as if it could encompass the whole human experience. Yes, I’m being hyperbolic, but still, there’s a kernel of truth there. Just as there is a plethora of formal mastery in Hamaguchi’s direction. His staging is never ostentatious, yet it bears the gravitas of purpose and the lightness of an elegant hand that never pushes too hard or guides the audience too overtly. Consider the leitmotif of feet moving along or raised above, never alone, never immobile or made to fit into a fixed (com)position. The camera shall always account for life and respond according to its demands.
But also, let’s talk about time. Though All of a Sudden’s screenplay is keen to remind us that time need not stay linear for every person, illustrating a dementia patient’s awareness of it as a sunburst of dotted lines, it also acknowledges that, in every case, mind and body experience it differently. Our addled subjectivity may time-travel, but the material organism of every one of us is bound by the unaltered and unwavering tick of the clock. Or the light changing through day’s long journey into night. Hamaguchi acknowledges this dichotomy by staging many scenes in long-take master shots, taking advantage of natural light that shifts with natural time. It’s a Bazinian conception of cinema made beautiful to behold by Alain Guichaoua’s lensing. It’s Mari’s conversation with her actor when, already staying full-time at the care home, she assures him he’ll be credited as a co-director of their play.
This means that, in the future, the thespian can continue to develop the show as he sees fit, creatively untethered from someone who’ll soon be his long-gone collaborator. There’s tension between the two, a director radically accepting of her mortality and a performer who wants to live in the moment and forget what’s running toward them both. Over the two figures, a golden twilight paints its dappled brilliance, filtered through the tree near Mari’s window, ruffling leaves making the shape feel alive. There are no cuts, so the abstract mural of yellow light slowly slips down the wall, darkening into umber, fading just like Mari’s body is doing. It’s an everyday tragedy told through the simplest means and in terms anyone can understand. Yet, in simplicity, Hamaguchi achieves something close to the transcendental, whittling away at his cinema until all that remains is essential, pure, neither ornamental or spectacular, nor failing into the pretension of absolute realism.
And to think there are a hundred other little details that beg mention - characters fleshed out despite their distance from the narrative’s center, the olive branch of curiosity and understanding extended by our protagonists and by the text to those who might have felt antagonistic at first, the comedy that comes with a curious little cat, the meter-like quality of a score acting as chronometer and as lullaby, rap songs inspired by a job once taken for its hours but now grown into a vocation, the ghost of two mothers who’ve unwittingly led their daughters into conflict, the resentment of a son melting away in a perfect cutaway shot. There’s so much here. And I want to live within it. I want to stay in the world of All of a Sudden. I want to believe it can be our world. That it already is our world, pain and all, with care and hope and human connection prevailing. Please, let’s believe in it… together.
All of a Sudden will play next as part of the New York Film Festival’s Main Slate. It will then receive a limited theatrical release starting November 25, courtesy of NEON. It is also Japan’s official submission in the Best International Film race for the 99th Academy Awards, an Oscar once won by Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car.