All of a Sudden

Part of my coverage of the 62nd Chicago International Film Festival

ALL OF A SUDDEN   **1/2

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2026

IDEA:  Marie-Lou, the director of a nursing home in France, forms a serendipitous friendship with Mari, a Japanese theater director dying of cancer.

BLURB:  The pleasures of a Ryusuke Hamaguchi film are the pleasures of salutary human interaction: of spontaneity, generosity, curiosity, and inspiration passing between people who, more often than not, have been thrown together by chance. Set in the world of elder care, All of a Sudden has an explicit, particularly haptic focus on such interactions. The caregivers at Garden of Freedom are learning a method that keeps them in close physical contact with their residents: gazes are held from centimeters away, hands gently cup shoulders, and upraised feet are massaged in the early-summer sun. Rooted in individualized attention, embodied empathy, and sensory alertness that benefit both sides of the care relationship, it’s the ideal Marie-Lou is fighting for against a for-profit system that sees elder bodies only as numbers. Much of All of a Sudden plays out as a literal dialogue about capitalism’s inhospitality to effective healthcare, with bureaucratic conversations and whiteboard diagrams alike serving as Marxist-lite primers. Hamaguchi’s images are mostly static and straight-on, his main characters forthright and unwaveringly virtuous, giving large stretches of the film the tenor of a PSA. This is not the thorny, elusive Hamaguchi of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy or Evil Does Not Exist but the treacly Hamaguchi of Drive My Car, the cornball humanist who signifies interconnectedness by naming his protagonists Marie and Mari — and having a bird poop on both at the same perfect interval. All of a Sudden, like Drive My Car, hinges on a stage play that blends into the action of the film, in this case one designed to destigmatize illness and old age. Hamaguchi’s faith in art and basic human kindness to accomplish empathic goals remains moving, even if this film’s iffy conceptualization doesn’t always support the passion of his conviction.