Ryusuke Hamaguchi: the cinema of what the speaker doesn’t quite say

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Photo: Heiyinmatthewlo / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 16, 1978 Kawasaki, Japan
Occupation	Film director
Known for	Drive My Car, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Evil Does Not Exist
Awards	Academy Award · Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, Berlin · Grand Jury Prize, Venice Film Festival · BAFTA · Golden Globe

Every film Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes contains at least one extended scene in which characters speak lines they have already said once, or will say again. The repetition is not an accident or an indulgence. It is the argument: that language, however precise, can be rehearsed into transparency, and that something truer lives just below the surface of what two people are able to say to each other. It is the most consistently productive idea in world cinema right now, and it belongs entirely to him.

Born in Kawasaki in 1978, Hamaguchi studied aesthetics and literature at the University of Tokyo before entering the film program at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, where he trained under director Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The education was formative in ways that went beyond technique. Kurosawa’s cinema — surfaces that conceal catastrophe, the familiar world made suddenly strange — left its mark. Hamaguchi inverted the method: rather than horror beneath the domestic, he pursued intimacy that arrives too late, connection that almost happens.

His international reputation began not with a prestigious debut but with a five-hour drama made in Kobe with non-professional actors recruited through acting workshops. Happy Hour, completed in 2015, follows four women in the aftermath of a divorce and a friendship that can no longer hold its original shape. The Locarno Film Festival awarded its Best Actress prize to the entire cast. Critics discovered a director for whom duration was not a statement about patience but a precision instrument: given enough time, a conversation reveals its actual subject.

Asako I & II, in 2018, brought his work to Cannes’ main competition for the first time, tracking a woman drawn twice to men with identical faces and entirely different lives. Then came the double breakthrough of 2021. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy — three linked stories about desire, misreading, and a chance encounter between strangers — won the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize in Berlin. Drive My Car, which adapts a Haruki Murakami story while surrounding it with a theatrical staging of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya performed by an international cast in multiple languages including Russian sign language, took the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes and then the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film, along with nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. No Japanese filmmaker had received that level of recognition since Akira Kurosawa.

The Oscar transformed the discourse around Hamaguchi’s work, and not always usefully. The phrase “slow cinema” attached itself to his films and has not left. It obscures what is actually happening in them. His films are long, but the tension in a Hamaguchi scene is not a matter of pace — it is a matter of permission: whether characters will allow themselves to know what they already know. Drive My Car is, from one angle, a film about a director who cannot bring himself to hear a recording of his dead wife’s voice. What makes it work is the structural conceit — a theatrical rehearsal process embedded within the film — which functions as a formal joke about the limits of language that much of the English-language critical apparatus somehow took entirely at face value. The film is funnier, and colder, than its reception suggested.

Evil Does Not Exist, released in 2023 after premiering at Venice where it won the Grand Jury Prize, marked another deliberate register shift: quieter, rural, set in a mountain village threatened by a glamping development, and ending in a way that divided audiences and confirmed that Hamaguchi had no interest in consolidating the expectations his Oscar had created. The following year it won Best Film at the Asian Film Awards.

In 2026, Hamaguchi made his first film in French. All of a Sudden — Soudain in its original title — was co-produced across France, Japan, Germany, and Belgium, and stars Virginie Efira as a Parisian nursing home director implementing a compassionate care technique called Humanitude, and Tao Okamoto as a terminally ill Japanese playwright whose arrival disrupts the order of things. The film draws on the real correspondence between a philosopher and an anthropologist about illness, care, and what friendship looks like when one person is dying. At the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Efira and Okamoto shared the Best Actress prize.

All of a Sudden opens in the United States on November 25, 2026, distributed by Neon, and is Japan’s official submission for the 99th Academy Awards. Whether the French-language step marks a permanent expansion or a single excursion into another language’s register, the central question remains the one his career has posed throughout: what can two people actually know about each other, and does it help to say it out loud.