All of a Sudden

At the centre of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s latest film, his first shot largely in French, is an extended exchange between Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira, TIFF ’25’s A Private Life), the newly appointed director of a Parisian elderly-care facility, and Mari (Tao Okamoto), a Japanese theatre director living with terminal cancer. Their conversation moves across languages and ideas — from capitalism, demographic decline, and social exhaustion, to illness, caregiving, and art itself — yet Hamaguchi uses dialogue less as exposition than as an ethical practice: a way of listening, testing thought, and reaching toward another person.

Theatre is crucial to this encounter, and to Hamaguchi’s poetics. Mari’s play, Up Close, No One Is Normal, brings into the film the vision of Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, whose radical challenge to institutional confinement echoes through Marie-Lou’s efforts to rethink care. As in Hamaguchi’s earlier work, performance is never closed fiction: it becomes a space where body, thought, and relationships are tested.

Drawing inspiration from a book of letters between a terminally ill philosopher and a medical anthropologist, Hamaguchi expands his cinema of words while exposing the limits of speech. Marie-Lou and Mari often converse in languages that are not their own, and the leads give extraordinary performances shaped by precision, vulnerability, and emotional generosity.

Shot in a working care facility, with professional actors alongside real patients, All of a Sudden allows chance and fragility into its rigorous structure. What emerges is a profound vision of care — as a measure of time, risk, and renewed contact with others and the world.

GIOVANNA FULVI