Sometimes changing someone’s life begins with simply listening to them.
NEON has released the official U.S. trailer for All of a Sudden, the new drama from Oscar-winning Drive My Car director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi.
Virginie Efira stars as Marie-Lou, the newly appointed director of an elderly care facility near Paris who is attempting to introduce a radically more compassionate approach to looking after its residents.
Her philosophy prioritises dignity, communication and empathy — treating the people in her care as individuals rather than problems to be managed.
Not everyone around her agrees.
Facing resistance from staff and pressure from a system increasingly driven by efficiency and money, Marie-Lou begins questioning how much one person can realistically change.
Then she meets Mari.
Played by Tao Okamoto, Mari is a Japanese theatre director from Kyoto living with terminal cancer. What begins as a chance encounter gradually develops into an unusually deep friendship between two women confronting very different versions of mortality, responsibility and the question of how a person should be allowed to live.
Together, they begin pushing against the systems surrounding them and trying, in the film’s words, to “make the impossible possible.”
All of a Sudden is loosely inspired by a nonfiction correspondence between a terminally ill philosopher and a medical anthropologist, but Hamaguchi relocates the relationship into the world of an elderly care facility.
That location wasn’t simply recreated for the film.
Much of the production took place inside a real care home near Paris, with residents and staff eventually becoming involved in filming and some appearing as extras.
It also marks new territory for Hamaguchi, who shoots extensively in France and moves between French and Japanese throughout the story.
The film premiered in competition at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where Efira and Okamoto jointly received the Best Actress award for their performances.
And while a 196-minute drama about healthcare, mortality and human connection may not sound like conventional crowd-pleasing cinema, early attention has centred on precisely what Hamaguchi does best: long conversations that slowly become something much bigger.
All of a Sudden isn’t really a story about illness.
It’s about what happens when two people genuinely see one another — and how dramatically that can change the time they have left.
All of a Sudden opens in select U.S. theaters on November 25, 2026.
