‘All of a Sudden’ is a Drama About Learning to Live Before it’s Too Late

I saw All of a Sudden at this year’s 64th New York Film Festival. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has always been interested in what happens when two people sit down, really talk, and accidentally change each other’s lives. All of a Sudden takes that instinct and stretches it across France, Japan, illness, caregiving, theater, bureaucracy, grief, and the most terrifying question most of us avoid is: what does it actually mean to be alive? The film stars Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Kyôzô Nagatsuka, Kodai Kurosaki, and Marie Bunel.

Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) runs Garden of Freedom, a care facility in France that is barely holding itself together. Staff are frustrated. Money is tight. Workers are quitting. Residents are dying. Marie-Lou wants to rethink how elderly people are treated, not just keep them fed, clothed, and alive until the clock runs out. Her philosophy is simple, but apparently radical: old people are still people. Even if they have lost memory, lost movement, or require constant care. The irony is that Marie extends none of that compassion to herself. She barely sleeps, barely rests, has no real personal life, and is running headfirst toward burnout while insisting everybody else deserves dignity.

Their first real encounter happens almost by accident after Marie-Lou helps a young Japanese boy, Tomoki (Kurosaki), and meets his grandfather, Goro (Nagatsuka). Mari (Okamoto), a theater director, then shows up and invites her to a performance. During the show, she reveals that she is terminally ill. From there, the film becomes something much more intimate. Marie-Lou and Mari spend years talking about death, work, love, capitalism, caregiving, guilt, and the systems that tell us what a “useful” life is supposed to look like. Marie-Lou is fighting the system of institutional care. Mari is fighting the system she has built inside herself. Somewhere inside all of that, they fall in love. That is where Hamaguchi is strongest.

The attraction between Efira and Okamoto is never pushed or over-explained. There is no grand romantic machinery. No need to underline every beat. You just watch these two women become necessary to each other. A look lasts too long. A conversation gets too intimate. One remembers to take care of the other. Their queerness is present without swallowing the entire relationship. They are clearly women in love, but the movie is not reducing them to that fact. Mari also becomes a living extension of Marie-Lou’s philosophy of care. She brings theater, imagination, touch, humor, and interaction into spaces that have become sterile. Even while dying, she is helping other people feel alive.

Hamaguchi’s recurring love of theater fits beautifully here. At first, Mari’s performances can feel like digressions, but they become thematic mirrors. Theater is where people rehearse life, death, identity, regret. It becomes another way for the movie to explain itself without having someone sit down and announce the theme.

At over three hours, All of a Sudden is patient to the point of stubbornness. There are stretches where the administrative material around the care facility starts to feel repetitive. Hamaguchi loves conversation, and sometimes he loves it enough to make you earn your seat. The performances keep pulling the film back into focus. Efira gives Marie-Lou the exhausted tension of someone who has confused sacrifice with virtue. Okamoto is looser, warmer, more mischievous, but never turns Mari into some saintly dying woman sent to teach the healthy person how to live. That would be too easy. Instead, both women are caretakers. Both are damaged. Both need something from the other.

By the end, All of a Sudden lands on a painfully simple concept that sometimes the person closest to death is the one who reminds everybody else they have been wasting time.

All of a Sudden is in theaters on November 25, 2026.