All of a Sudden (Soudain): Film Review

All Of A Sudden (Soudain) showcases Ryūsuke Hamaguchi in full-throated expression of his intelligence, optimism, and naïveté.

Hamaguchi sidesteps such accusations by keeping these chats real, and infusing them with warmth, ensuring that the time is well spent. All Of A Sudden (Soudain), his first film made outside Japan, tests the limits of his approach. It’s full of generous and intelligent characters that draw you towards them with their grace, but Hamaguchi is so enamoured with them that he can’t resist treating them a little too well, threatening to shave off any hint of a rough edge.

Virginie Efira makes her second appearance in a Francophone debut from a non-French director at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. All Of A Sudden is handily a better film than the failed meta hijinks of Parallel Tales, but in both cases she proves herself a generous performer, submitting to the whims of very different projects, casts and directors. She plays Marie-Lou, the recently appointed director of a care home for dementia patients in a leafy Paris suburb. Dedicated to the well-being of the patients in her care, Marie-Lou oversees new training for her staff that emphasizes patient involvement over speedy completion of tasks, to the chagrin of experienced staff and shareholders alike.

Part of Hamaguchi’s appeal is his willingness to explore real world issues within the glossy confines of a film set. Healthcare systems are crumbling all over in the face of budget cuts and high staff turnover, and even well-to-do establishments such as Marie-Lou’s are feeling the pinch. The greed of shareholders is effectively (if unsubtly) demonstrated when one of Marie-Lou’s Zoom meetings is brought to an abrupt end in temper.

Hamaguchi will touch on more painfully real issues before our three and a half hours are up, but healthcare of all kinds is All Of A Sudden’s primary focus. For the film’s first hour, the camera surveils Marie-Lou, plunging us down with her into her various despairs. A new live-in staff scheme is treated with suspicion by some staff members, others are threatening to quit over the new training, and there’s the inevitable passing of some of the home’s residents. The pileup of stressors is true to life; Hamaguchi possesses a rare gift for choosing narrative developments that feel both forced and relatable. He and co-writer Léa Le Dimna make Marie-Lou suffer a hundred little indignities for just long enough before she signed off on medical leave from stress, and a welcome release of pressure segues into the second act.

Travelling home one day, Marie-Lou encounters Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), a severely autistic teenager who appears to be lost. She manages to track down his grandfather Goro (Kyōzō Nagatsuka), who is in Paris to appear in a play. The play is directed by Mari (Tao Okamoto, of Lost Transmissions), an anthropologist-turned–director whose work incorporates not just Goro’s free performance style, but even includes the unbounded enthusiasm of Tomoki in the performance.

There is a lot of happenstance to all of this; Marie-Lou is fluent in Japanese having studied in Tokyo, and Mari’s approach to her play and Tomoki are influenced by alternative approaches to medical care. Still, after an hour of watching Efira barely keep body and soul together, we can probably tolerate a dose of kismet. The fact that this is all based on a real friendship doesn’t do much to undermine the whimsy; in fact, it adds to the sense that this shouldn’t be real, but that miracles can happen sometimes.

After a performance of the play, Mari and Marie-Lou (Might they be two sides of the same coin? One wonders…) converse while wandering the surrounding streets, apparently bonding closer with each passing sentence. This should all reek of contrivance, but their conversations are so stimulating (both to them and us) that we can’t help but be held rapt. They teach each other about one another’s experiences, all while speaking their respective languages.

This bond is forged in friendship, solidarity and mutual respect, and the actresses drive each other to explore the emotions below their chat. It is slowly revealed that Mari has received a terminal cancer diagnosis, but is managing to keep going for now. Perhaps it is that inevitability of death that drives Mari to engage in discussion with her new friend on a wide array of topics, from capitalism, to democracy, to good massage technique. Their friendship becomes the ultimate healthcare.

For its first two acts, All Of A Sudden is too good to be true. It keeps the right side of twee self-satisfaction, all the while granting its characters the right to express their intellects and true feelings. However, the last act developments, with Mari needing additional medical care and Marie-Lou returning to work, succumb to Hamaguchi’s need for a positive outlook. His previous film, Evil Does Not Exist, was refreshing in its refusal to let good triumph over every evil, but All Of A Sudden feels a compulsion to find the positives where it can, even in the face of certain death. A fine mindset to have, but as Marie-Lou and Mari journey to Japan and back within a few days, with no financial or scheduling impairments, the relatability that he worked so hard to build up threatens to ebb away. The events of the film take place in little over a month, stretching whatever credibility it had to breaking point.

Worse still, when Marie-Lou does return to work, Mari offers her input into the care of her patients and staff. The resulting scenes of reconciliation and progress morph the film’s gentle optimism into all-out naïveté, sitting awkwardly alongside the tension that the first half worked hard to build up. After slowly building a central relationship based on mutual respect and trust, All Of A Sudden threatens to bring it down with mawkishness that doesn’t fit with the rest of the film’s ethos. By then though, it has cast its spell, and that central pair will be what lingers afterwards.

All of a Sudden (Soudain) premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 15, 2026.