Name: All of a Sudden
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Genre: Drama
Cast: Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto

The year asked whether a jury would still reward a film that demands three hours of patience to watch two women talk, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s answer was to make the talking the whole event. All of a Sudden, his first film in French, won its two leads a shared Best Actress prize — Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, named together — and the decision not to choose between them is the most accurate verdict the film could have drawn. It is built as a duet; awarding half of it would have misread the structure.

Efira plays Marie-Lou Fontaine, who runs a nursing home in the Paris suburbs and pushes a care philosophy her staff resists, a method built on treating the dying as people rather than tasks. Okamoto plays Mari Morisaki, a terminally ill Japanese playwright whose arrival reorganises Marie-Lou’s sense of her own work. The film sets care against the economics that constrain it, and lets the friction between a system measured in efficiency and a death measured in attention carry the drama without ever raising its voice.

Hamaguchi works the way critics at Cannes have come to expect and the broad arthouse audience still finds startling: long, unbroken dialogue scenes that refuse to cut for emphasis, performances calibrated to the register of actual conversation rather than dramatic beats. The bilingual structure — French and Japanese threaded through the same rooms — turns translation itself into a theme, the gap between what is said and what survives the crossing. The premiere drew a seven-minute ovation, and the film sat among the highest-rated titles on the critics’ grid.

The win extends a career that has quietly become one of the most decorated in world cinema. Hamaguchi reached a global audience with Drive My Car, after the five-hour Happy Hour and the Berlin-winning Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, and All of a Sudden is his first move into European-language production. He carries the same instrument across the border: dialogue as the load-bearing structure, duration as a form of respect for the viewer’s attention rather than a test of it.

What the film cannot get around is its own length. A 196-minute drama about end-of-life care is, by design, a hard sell to the audience whose relationship with mortality it most wants to reach, and the shared acting prize, while precise, also quietly admits the jury could not rank one half of a two-hander over the other. Whether that reads as generosity or indecision is the argument the film leaves in the room.

The forward path runs through the specialty circuit Hamaguchi has mastered, now with two prize-winning performances to carry it. For Efira, a César-level fixture of French cinema, the award is international consolidation; for Okamoto, better known to global audiences from genre and franchise work, it is a reframing. A Cannes acting prize tends to redirect the careers it touches, and a shared one redirects two at once — the quietest large consequence of the night.