Ryūsuke Hamaguchi continues his tremendous streak with All of a Sudden, starring Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, screening at the 2026 BFI London Film Festival. This profound story of two soulmates left me speechless, teary-eyed, and made me fall in love with the power of cinema as if for the first time.
Plot in a nutshell
Marie-Lou (Efira) is a director of a nursing home and is struggling to introduce a more compassionate approach for Alzheimer’s and dementia patient care. Mari (Okamoto) is a Japanese theatre director battling terminal cancer. Their paths cross through a stroke of serendipity and through intimate conversations a profound bond is forged, creating a life-changing impact on both women.
The Review
All of a Sudden is the movie that 2026 desperately needs. In a world plagued by senseless wars, grotesque crimes against humanity, fear of new pandemics, anxiety over machine takeovers, and the general degradation of a global rules-based order and Western moral values, it’s no wonder that the trend in cinema has skewed towards a glass-half-empty worldview. We are living in a timeline in which Homer’s The Odyssey has been adapted as one long PTSD therapy session and has become one of the most commercially successful films in history. Nihilism seems to be the overriding protocol, no doubt. And that’s why watching a movie like All of a Sudden feels like drinking the antidote right before the poison is able to take full effect.
The film is directed with impossibly effervescent care by the wonderful Japanese humanist-philosopher-director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, and has that cinéma vérité feel without the hand-held shakiness and improvised acting. Efira and Okamoto are a match made in heaven’s screen chemistry lab; both embodying their characters so completely that you end up walking out of the breezy three-hour encounter feeling like you’ve just met two real-life people that you, all of a sudden, care very deeply about.
Films like this are a rare breed; doing a capsule review during a festival, while having a Thai horror film you saw 2 hours ago stuck in your head, feels like a disservice. Marie-Lou and Mari’s all-nighter conversations are perpetual springs of thoughtful reflections; the nurses, caregivers, patients and families of patients at the nursing home are an entire universe onto themselves. All of it seems impossible to capture on film, and yet it is. One of the main themes in the story is the idea of making something impossible possible, which is exactly what the mere existence of a film like All of a Sudden feels like. Miraculous is the word that comes to mind.
There is, however, a small niggle. An academic dissection of capitalism that borders on self-righteousness in the second act that I struggle with. It sticks out like a fallen tree that disturbs the natural flow of a river, but it’s a temporary disturbance and the river continues to flow generously until the, emotionally charged and satisfying, end.
There’s so much more I’d love to write because this is the kind of film that will stay with me for years, probably forever, but that’s for another time. For now, I’ll end with one of my favorite lines from the film:
By helping others we avoid hurting ourselves.