All of a Sudden

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is among the most garlanded filmmakers of his generation: Drive My Car (2021) won the Academy Award for Best International Feature and a Cannes screenplay prize, and Happy Hour and Evil Does Not Exist cemented his standing. All of a Sudden — French title Soudain — is his first film made in France, a Japan–France–Belgium–Germany co-production that premiered in the main competition of the 79th Cannes Film Festival in 2026, where Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize.

Adapted from a book by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono drawn from a real correspondence, the film follows Marie-Lou Fontaine, who runs a nursing home in the Paris suburbs and insists, against her colleagues' resistance, on the tender "Humanitude" approach to care. Her encounter with Mari Morisaki, a terminally ill Japanese playwright, reshapes her sense of her work and herself. Across 196 minutes and two languages, Hamaguchi applies his signature long, conversational scenes to questions of dignity, attention and mortality, scored by Samuel Andreyev.

Reviewed warmly at Cannes, where it holds a 91% score on Rotten Tomatoes, the film extends the patient humanism of Drive My Car into a new national context without losing its maker's voice. That a Japanese director should win Best Actress for two performances in a largely French-language film speaks to the borderless, deeply attentive cinema Hamaguchi has come to represent.