EVIL DOES NOT EXIST — OR DOES IT?
Subtle and rich, this haunting film illuminates a necessary act of madness
Japan's Ryûsuke Hamaguchi has emerged over the past decade as one of the world's finest working directors, but his movies can be frustratingly hard to encapsulate. They deal in the mysteries of human interaction, the baggage we carry and struggle to cast off, and sins both personal and societal. They may not seem like much when you watch them, but they have the grace to linger and haunt. Evil Does Not Exist may be his most haunting film yet.
At 106 minutes, it's also one of his shortest, at least compared with 2021's Oscar-winning Drive My Car (three hours of grief, guilt and Uncle Vanya) or the five-hour-plus Happy Hour (2015), about the shifting friendships of four middle-aged women.
Evil Does Not Exist takes place in a rural village outside Nagano, to the north of Tokyo, and in its deceptively unfocused fashion, it frets about the encroachment of city life on the last outposts of wilderness. The film's understated hero is Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower who lives with his young daughter Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) and gets by on odd jobs. He's Hamaguchi's version of Thoreau's Natural Man, existing in harmony with the trees he fells for firewood, the mountain streams he drinks from, and the wild wasabi and Siberian ginseng he plucks from the ground.
The arrival of two PR flacks for a developer who wants to build a glamping site outside of town rings alarm bells among the locals. It leads to a long and amusingly satisfying town meeting in which the reps present their plan to what they assume will be docile country folk, only to have it thoroughly picked to pieces. In particular, the site's waste facilities would threaten the village's water supply — but the outsiders brush that danger off. For non-Japanese audiences, the scene shows how a culture of subservient politeness can serve as a front for corporate steamrollering — “your valuable input will be considered,” the villagers are blandly told. It also shows how direct confrontation can bring that steamroller clanking to a halt.
With almost any other filmmaker, the flacks, Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), would be clearcut villains. Hamaguchi, though, deals not in black and white, but in a full palette of shades, and the movie's title is more provocation than a statement to be taken at face value. In relatively quick fashion, Takahashi and Mayuzumi, both of them disconnected and discontented urbanites, find themselves drawn to the seeming simplicity of Takumi's lifestyle and tempted to chuck everything and go country. Evil Does Not Exist plays this for perceptive and biting human comedy; Takahashi's clumsy but proud attempts to split logs for the first time are very near to slapstick.
For all that, an undercurrent of foreboding ripples beneath this film. It edges toward outright unease late in the game and explodes in the final scene with what seems an inexplicable act of violence. The ending of Evil Does Not Exist created much debate among international festivalgoers last fall, and it presents a challenge to general audiences who prefer their stories wrapped up neatly rather than detonating in their faces. Having seen the movie twice now, it's clear to me that Hamaguchi is taking a leap into poetic metaphor for which his characters have been poised the entire running time and which viewers are meant to carry home like a pebble in their shoe.
Visually, sonically and thematically, Evil Does Not Exist is a rich and subtle experience. Yoshio Kitagawa's cinematography frames humans as small elements in a wide canvas of forest and field, the bright colours of their jackets like points of unnatural light seen through the tangles of branches. A gorgeous string score by Eiko Ishibashi — written before the movie and serving as the director's first inspiration — lets dissonance creep in like a jungle reclaiming a clearing. In his calm and open-hearted way, Hamaguchi has given us a horror story about a slowly vanishing wilderness and its way of life. He knows that in a world where everyone has their reasons, pushing back may be a necessary act of madness.