NZIFF Round Table Reviews: All of a Sudden

WEB EXCLUSIVE | REVIEW | NZIFF 

This is part of a series of roundtable discussions and extended dialogues conducted by Ricky Lai (@rickthelai), Trevor Pronoso (@CleverGurl), Madeline Smith (@prime4illusion), and Caeden Tipler (@ctipler) on films that have premiered at NZIFF 2026.

The following exchange is between Ricky, Trevor, and Madeline on Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's latest film, All of a Sudden.

All of a Sudden (2026)

dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

France/Japan, 196 mins

Trevor: Another thought I need to expel before I sleep: watching this film is like Hamaguchi and me sharing the same box of Legos, where we both know the shapes and characteristics of each brick. But as I'm building my own little structure, I look over at Hamaguchi, and he's building a wholly different kind of structure; then, I look more closely and see that he has the same pieces as I do, yet manages to combine these individual bricks into a whole that's novel and exciting. I feel grateful that Hamaguchi pokes holes in the film that could have developed in my head and diverts it towards the most empathetic, generous, and benevolent narrative circumstances.

A radically kind film.

Ricky: It is remarkable how often Hamaguchi reaches his "predictable" conclusions, taking unpredictable routes. It's a genuinely boundless film, and the runtime's perceived overflow suggests it achieves what the film describes as making the impossible possible—never falling short for lack of trying. At the risk of sounding too lofty or flowery, it does genuinely feel as if it 'contains the universe'. An impossible task, but he does it. As a bonus thought, it also inadvertently feels like a digest of so many of the films I've seen this festival season: renewal (Dao), multilingual expression (Chronovisor), loving people you don't completely know (Blue Heron), relation with the earth (Our Land, Dry Leaf), elderly bodies (Barbara Forever), long think-tank conversation (Fjord), yearning for boundlessness and the idea of being seen (The Ice Tower), work and fatigue (Rose of Nevada), and having your worldview refreshed by a piece of art (Gail Daughtry & The Celebrity Sex Pass). I'm kidding about that last one.

The regular seminars hosted by Laurence (a ray of sunshine) consist of intimate stories shared with an audience, and I found it hard not to compare these conversations to the Q&A session at Mari's play. In a primarily French-speaking crowd, Marie-Lou takes the microphone and shares a personal anecdote with Mari, in Japanese, about how the play touched her. Just as Mari is about to translate what was said for the rest of the audience, Goro chimes in, suggesting it doesn't need to be shared; we can all tell it was a very meaningful exchange. This rhymes somewhat with the later scene—the centrepiece?—the fifteen-minute whiteboard lecture about capitalism, where, among other things, Mari is codedly flirting with Marie-Lou to hint that she should slow down, take it easy, get some sleep.

Btw, am I thinking of the right person when I say Laurence? Let me know.

Madeline: At first, All of a Sudden seems to be something of a pivot from Evil Does Not Exist and what could be described as its anti-humanism (or at least a major complication of humanism). Given that I've been throwing around this vaguely defined term a lot, it might be worth stating that my conception of it is the idea that human life has inherent value, and that human beings are inherently deserving of compassion and dignity (with the asterisk that the idea of who gets to be a 'human being' is extremely limited, rendering this compassion and dignity entirely conditional). Generally, a film being referred to as 'humanist' suggests an upholding of these values (with similar limitations). In Evil Does Not Exist, the characters who would normally play the lead roles in a Hamaguchi film are the PR representatives whose job is to promote the construction of a glamping site that will cause significant ecological destruction to the main characters' village. These characters appear halfway through and are portrayed quite sympathetically, and are perhaps easier to identify with for the film's middle-class film festival audience than the protagonists, who are deliberately represented with some distance. I won't spoil the film's conclusion. However, it raises many questions about whether these characters' 'humanity' is enough to actually mean anything, and whether a true vindication of them would take priority over the destruction of the lives of the human other and the non-human. This suggests a sense of autocritique in Hamaguchi in some ways, and I was curious whether his next film would continue along similar lines.

All of a Sudden is something of a return to humanism, though in a form that is more directly politicised than Hamaguchi's previous work. I think any humanist fiction that tries to engage with political matters seriously will inevitably deal with the limits of humanism in some way. If it's not going to address the question of what defines a 'human' and whether valuing the human comes at the expense of anything left outside that category, it will at least acknowledge that we do not live in a world that values compassion and dignity. These concerns are at the forefront of All of a Sudden and Marie-Lou's quest to promote 'Humanitude', a form of caregiving designed to uphold the patient's dignity. As we will hear many times throughout the film, Humanitude is neither popular nor profitable, and Mari-Lou struggles to promote its benefits in the face of uncaring staff and higher-ups. While the struggle to commit to humanist ideals within a capitalist system is once again a core conflict, the film strays far from Evil Does Not Exist's ambiguous/outright anti-humanist conclusion—by the end, compassion ultimately wins out, and we learn that nobody (at least nobody represented on-screen) is truly a 'bad person'. I think if the basic plotline were given to another director, or cut down to 2 hours, it would be very easy to dismiss this material as sentimental or naive. Hamaguchi takes so much care in bringing us into his characters' world that he makes it believable.

What interests me more is how Hamaguchi represents disability and dementia. The disabled subject is an especially evident case of 'humanity' being conditional. Disability challenges normative assumptions about the body and/or subjectivity, and as a result, the disabled subject is seen as lacking some essential element of 'humanity', and therefore undeserving of 'humane' treatment. In the case of dementia, its impact upon a previously stable subjectivity leads to a view of it as a slow dehumanisation, rendering the subject as no longer human. Obviously, I don't want to act as if dementia isn't painful or doesn't involve loss. But this point of view surely does not help the patient, and at worst, it directly enables abuse. The filmmaker Kazuo Hara, discussing his documentary about cerebral palsy, Goodbye CP, discusses how the disabled are 'humanised' in documentaries through showing them succeeding at a 'normal' or 'everyday' activity. This appeal is in the idea that they are 'just like us' and therefore deserving of dignity and compassion, once again reinforcing a very conditional view of these values. Can we 'humanise' dementia patients without reinforcing those ideals? Humanitude takes the position that the dementia patient must be understood as a 'human being', but it is about the caregiver changing their means of communication to accommodate the patient's subjectivity, rather than the patient being forced to conform to theirs. I am curious to hear if there are any critiques of the concept from people who know more about dementia and/or caregiving than I do; it strikes me as a genuinely inclusive form of humanism, and I was very touched by the scenes where it's practised. It's also very fitting material for Hamaguchi, whose project is based around finding new methods of communication and intimacy.

There is also much to say about how this is represented in the relationship between Marie-Lou and Mari; I haven't discussed it much here since it's more familiar territory for Hamaguchi.

Trevor: I think the term you're really looking for is 'post-humanism'. I'll probably revise this response once I watch Evil Does Not Exist, but All of a Sudden seems to me a continuation of this critique of humanist ideologies and practices that are intentionally/unintentionally motivated by deficit theories of what we should consider 'humanist' and what types of people can we consider 'human'. While you may say it's an inclusive perspective on humanism (or something of a return to humanism), I'd say it's a continuation of Hamaguchi's skewering of humanism's failure to account for anti-humanist systems that paradoxically underpin it. I point to the pyramid diagram on the whiteboard where 'democracy' sits at the very top, with nature and humans (well-being) positioned in the lower tiers of the hierarchy.

Humanism deals with individuals, with 'humans', as rational, free agents, positing very universalising—dare I say, romantic and nostalgic—conceptions of progress that have little to no basis in the history of human social interactions (beyond the preservation of the family/village unit), or, at least, humanism is in accordance to the idea of people holding considerable amount of power and influence over their surroundings that necessitate the continuation of the species no matter what. It's this arrogance that post-humanism tries to combat, which I think Hamaguchi attempts to materially actualise in the film's final sequence: a particular posthuman utopia (the name of the elderly home is "Le jardin de la liberté", an Edenic, posthuman space). Post-humanism deals with re-establishing notions of humans inhabiting wider systemic frameworks of existence, which may include ecological and technological notions of coexistence towards 'progress'. Hamaguchi's chosen milieu of an elder/nursing home is crucial; it's a place that urban capitalist societies consider a 'dumping ground' for humans who are no longer economically productive, for humans who are nearing the end of their 'human' life and can't realise the humanist-capitalist goal.

In other words, if humanism was the goal, capitalism historically became the reluctant method, and it's this insight that Hamaguchi wants to present to us explicitly. Hamaguchi frames the entire film around humans who will cease to become human, to be alive, and as a result, are seeking alternative ways of existing where their individual selves are no longer the centre of existence, where collaboration and solidarity of humans function in favour of a utopia they won't live long enough to realise. Hamaguchi posits a posthumanist world where the spirit and memory of humans live on rather than their naive (humanist) corporeal preservation, a world where alternative forms of human existence are explored, no matter how quirky or awkward they are compared to traditional medical/capitalist practices.

You could also make the vulgar notion of disability and dementia's social standing a vital component of humanism, an inherent inequality. In the same way that feudalism requires a king to rule over serfs and peasants, and capitalism requires the bourgeoisie to rule over the proletariat, humanism needs a point of comparison where humans cease to be 'human' and become 'inhuman' or 'sub-human'. It's a worldview that also necessitates other living beings, non-human beings, to also be subordinate to the human being, as comparable to disabled people who lack the physical/cognitive functions of an able-bodied human (already a very deficient view of humans). If anything, Marie-Lou's version of Humanitude should be called 'Post-humanitude'.

I forgot to mention, my perspective on disability, and thus how this film frames disability, is heavily influenced by disability rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson's debate with philosopher Peter Singer in 2003. It's a great read, but also definitely formative for peeps who are dissatisfied with humanist grandstanding. I should also say I'm with her in avoiding the question of why Peter Singer values the life of animals more than the possibility of humans born with disabilities (and by extension, his utilitarian view of the right to abortion).

Ricky: Following that, I think it's also instructive to view through a humanist (and subsequently 'posthumanist') lens how Hamaguchi's bilingual characters communicate with one another. If a humanistic approach to language proposes that the syntactic quality of the language spoken isn't necessarily more important than the content, encompassing physical, social & emotional values of the person, then The Humanistic Approach to Language Teaching helps to clarify the motive behind Goro's interruption of Mari at the Q&A. Further informed by his experience as an ethnic minority in France, Goro posits that what Marie-Lou and Mari confided to one another in Japanese isn't as valuable to the French-speaking audience as having heard an audible transmission of emotion. What's interesting is that he doesn't commit to this way of thinking during the final performance of Mari's play, the one in the care centre's courtyard. Goro performs in Japanese, with PowerPoint slides providing French subtitles. Yet, after Tomoki accidentally knocks over the monitor, Goro switches to performing the rest of the play in French to make sure Mari's message is heard by the French-speaking audience, thereby ensuring that her spirit and memory can continue to live on through the people around her. ("I don't want to leave." / "Stay as long as you like.") It's not as if he disagrees with his earlier self; perhaps his humanist view of language has evolved into something else.

You've also basically put into words something I initially couldn't. Remarkably, Hamaguchi uses this medium not only to articulate people's despair under capitalism, but also actively propose a philosophical solution to overcoming that despair; suggesting not that we demolish our humanist worldview (backpedalling into nihilism would be easier) but restructure those worldviews to account for a more comprehensive understanding of life, one beyond our established normative frameworks. This is why the final act begins with Marie-Lou's apology and subsequent restructuring of the Humanitude training process. All of a Sudden would still be a spectacular drama anyway if it ended after the Kobe trip, returning to Paris to reveal that Mari has, in fact, come back, and leaving it up to us to optimistically imagine her work as an artist-in-residence at Humanitude. But the remainder is crucial; it plays out like a present-tense improvisation (literally, given Goro's performance) for its characters to articulate/practice/simulate this renewed approach to living and sympathy.

For what it's worth, I also like my instant ramen al dente.