At the outset of Japanese auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film, we see only three words: Evil Does Exist. After a few seconds, the word “not” joins the sentence in a different colour, as though lacking confidence in its proposition.
In a sense, Hamaguchi seems to be asking whether the “not” belongs — whether that titular proclamation, Evil Does Not Exist, is true. As might be expected from Hamaguchi’s penchant for complicated, disquieting drama, the film provides a deeply engrossing search, but no easy answers.
The esoteric filmmaker’s two 2021 dramas — the achingly sensitive triptych Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and the Oscar-winning Drive My Car — earned him a newfound international audience. That success seems to have garnered Hamaguchi some traction, with Evil Does Not Exist receiving mainstream promotion ahead of a wide theatrical release in May.
In the wake of this popularity, he has embarked down an even more challenging, but ultimately more fruitful path. Evil Does Not Exist surpasses the gorgeous visuals, thematic complexity and startling timeliness of his previous two films.
Responding to a global moment of untethered corporate greed and ecological destruction, Hamaguchi has crafted an elegant, fable-like ode to the imperative righteousness of the environmentalist cause.
Evil Does Not Exist centres around a tranquil rural village outside of Tokyo whose residents enjoy a slow, peaceful life. In hypnotically painstaking detail, much of the film’s near-wordless first 20 minutes observes the locals serenely wandering the woods, collecting firewood and gathering fresh spring water.
This quaint lifestyle is interrupted when a company arrives with an ill-conceived plan to create a “glamping” site on the village’s scenic outskirts. To the company’s surprise, their plan is met with staunch and unanimous resistance from the locals. The residents express concern about an influx of tourists and, more importantly, the pollution of their natural water supply.
This may sound like a thin narrative for a feature-length film, and it is. The storyline is fairly uneventful, and Hamaguchi moves through it at a challengingly slow pace. Taking his minimalist influences to the extreme, drama and characterizations emerge from quiet in-between moments and wordlessly powerful gazes, rather than from expository dialogue. Shots linger on the beauty of nature or affected faces long after the “action” passes.
This precise, leisurely pace allows a simmering tension to arise from the deceptively simple narrative. The calm of the film’s surface slowly reveals itself to be a façade for a desperate underlying struggle between late-capitalist expansion and the holistic way of life it disrupts.
This deeply complicated tone is established in the stirring and disorienting opening shot. As Eiko Ishibashi’s beautifully eerie string score grows louder and more intense, the camera points up at the trees of a forest and moves forward as if strolling through. After several minutes, the edges of the screen seem to melt away. The simple image of trees in a forest becomes an alien world of disembodied limbs and leaves and sticks that seems all-consuming and never-ending.
Much of the film is composed of striking shots of the natural world like this one. But from that first moment, nature is just as magnificent as it is existentially humbling — it makes insignificant everything else on screen.
The narrative structure is similarly jarring. What seems at first to be a plotless ode to the natural world morphs into a reservedly intense confrontation: a strange, morally oblique exploration of the meeting between rural communities and urban expansion. The film does have a protagonist, a stoic single father who takes odd jobs around town, but his story and motivations largely remain a mystery.
Rather than the emotional hook that a straightforward narrative and conventionally sympathetic characters would provide, Hamaguchi opts for an intellectual exploration of the role of evil in corporate greed and expansion. The titular proposition — “evil does not exist” — seems true enough in the film’s first half, when the apparent “evil” of the imposing corporation is slowly peeled back to reveal well-intentioned parties on both sides.
As the film progresses, the kind words and pleasantries of the corporate liaisons slowly lose the power to hide their sinister intentions. The pretense of earnest collaboration from the locals similarly fades away, revealing the outright rage beneath. Hamaguchi lets this tension simmer until it boils over in a shocking finale, which elicited gasps at the film’s recent Ottawa premiere.
The ending may at first seem abrupt, but it lingers in the mind for days, slowly recontextualizing the entire film. By the time the credits roll, “evil does not exist” seems less like a declaration of fact and more like some naïve prayer mantra.
It should be reiterated that Evil Does Not Exist is a deeply challenging film, both in its slow pace and thematic complexity. But Hamaguchi’s craft is such that for the open-minded viewer, it is never boring. It brims with excellent, deeply-felt performances, simultaneously life-like and deeply philosophical dialogue, and utterly breathtaking imagery. These elements converge in a hypnotically melancholic atmosphere that aptly complements the film’s quietly potent sense of outrage at everyday ecological injustice.
Hamaguchi is one of the few contemporary filmmakers willing and able to deal almost exclusively with the contemporary world, in all its uncertainty, disconnection and social disaffection. Evil Does Not Exist, with its barely concealed anger and boldly direct commentary, is his most urgent and pointed work to date.
Featured image by IMDb.
