Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s humane drama offers a blossoming friendship amid tragedy, rewiring our perspectives on what truly being alive means.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi broke into the global film scene with his adaptation of Murakami’s short story that influenced Drive My Car (2021), a moody, expansive exploration on grief with his extensive dialogue and humanist flares. His follow-up, Evil Does Not Exist (2023), extends into capitalism territory regarding environmental issues against a rural community by coercive developers. Now a household name in the global film industry after an Oscar win, his newest film, All of a Sudden encapsulates his previous films, incorporating the need for communication and empathy between others to grow as humans and his urgent dramas about capitalism’s cascading effects. His latest follows the French Marie, short for Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) and Japanese Mari (Tao Okamoto), whose blossoming friendship make for one of the best on-screen female companionships, due to their empathetic and urgent call to heal.
Death is the thematic underbelly of Hamaguchi’s previous films and is heightened to another level through an unbreakable bond in a matter of hours. Told through a diarist approach inserting date title cards as its structure, Hamaguchi presents an iterative and successive process for its narrative. Marie, a director at a nursing home called ‘The Garden of Freedom’ meets Mari, a theater director, and only after a patient passes, grieving Marie encounters Tomoki, the autistic grandson of Goro, the actor starring in Mari’s play. The avant-garde play about the mentally challenged and the dissolution of psychiatrist hospitals leaves Marie extremely emotional and begins the longest and best stretch of the film – a walk and conversion along the Seine where we learn how the two are different in appearance, but the similar in character. The suspense in time begins once Mari reveals of her terminal illness, how it can suddenly lead to her death in no time once implications begin.
Hamaguchi’s strongest suits are firing on all cylinders: his direction on the actresses, rhythms and cadence of speaking, and most importantly, the urgency and complexity of his script. Marie’s simplification and precision in explaining a medical companies’ for-profit pressure on smaller clinics convinces the sad reality we live in. In this case, a company called Humanitude sparks tension due to its proposed benefits of verticality for patients to promote movement and standing. When Marie shares this, Mari’s responses bounce off each other into a breezy, yet comprehensive conversation about these issues and its correlation with capitalism. Whether it’ll be Marie’s impressive Japanese responses to Mari’s French, the cultural intertwining works because of the two’s deep empathy towards each other. It’s one of the key factors in their infectious chemistry and incredibly needed, especially how other filmmakers fail at the nuances of languages when making films outside of their country.
Within this diaristic approach, form and function are utilized once Mari’s illness flares up, setting up the tension and conclusion. This limiting factor limits the spontaneity of it all, consciously preparing us for the impending death, but rewards us in an emotional and layered repetition of Mari’s play at the nursing home. While far more restrained than the pleasurable hangout of the first half, the ticking clock towards death forces the viewers into a vulnerable position. It helps that the repetition is prevalent throughout, where the double names, quotidian, and stage play references, readjusts and reveals the nuances and allusions Hamaguchi lays out so well.
Reiterating on his astute usage of performances and role-playing, this exact method of expression is Hamaguchi’s signature touch. Both Mari(e)’s play for and against each other in their performances in the Humanitude workshops and theater play. The dramatization between the two intertwine into life itself, blurring once again what is performance and reality. It’s most notably emotional once the realization of how us viewers see the desire for life in Mari as her state of being alive becomes stronger than ever, directly looking at us. It’s a visual statement concluded over three hours of how systematic issues oppress the individual, but through collective enlightenment and empathy, despair transforms into hope.
Our team is on site for the 79th Cannes Film Festival, from May 12 to 23, 2026.
