Evil Does Not Exist
Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Running time: 1hr46 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Hitoshi Omika and Ryo Nishikawa in Evil Does Not Exist
The opening minutes of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s strange, tensely ruminative new film Evil Does Not Exist are both a seduction and a warning, calmly setting a mood before sharply shifting it. In a languidly sustained tracking shot at the outset, the camera gazes dreamily skyward, taking in a cobwebbed network of tree branches against a cold, pale sky, as Eiko Ishibashi’s richly textured score draws us into a woodsy reverie. Suddenly, the music ceases, but the shot continues; nature outlasts its manmade complement. Hamaguchi will repeat this harsh shifting of gears in the film, plunging us from tranquility into anxious uncertainty, and it’s startling every time he does so. In a fable about rural communities misread and underestimated by urban capitalists, any moments of pastoral romanticism are barbed and conditional.
It’s a story of gentrification, though not one burdened with clumpy, topical messaging. Frequently, Hamaguchi reverts to silence to make his point, or to let us arrive at one for ourselves. The setting is Mizubiki, a quiet, forested settlement within driving distance of Tokyo — home to modest-living locals like solitary woodsman and single father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), but an increasingly attractive retreat for city weekenders, which rather threatens to upend the villagers’ gentle, interdependent and ecologically sustainable routine. When two representatives from a development company descend on the community with elaborate plans for a money-spinning ‘glamping’ site, they’re met with a frosty welcome — the economic cynicism and environmental myopia of the scheme brutally unpicked in a town-hall meeting as beautifully written and dramatically fraught as the one in last year’s Film of the Week favourite R.M.N.
This setup might portend a pretty simplistic moral battle between dastardly townies and simple, salt-of-the-earth country folk. But beginning with that simultaneously declarative and ambiguous title, Evil Does Not Exist has something more complex and compromised in mind. The development reps’ heart isn’t in the plan they’re selling, and that’s before one grows besotted with Takumi’s way of living; Takumi, for his part, may be a devoted father and an upstanding citizen, but there’s a volatile hint of darkness amid all that virtue.
Hamaguchi’s last film, the marvellous, Oscar-winning Drive My Car, unfolded all the foibles and interior conflicts of its characters across three hypnotic hours; his latest works on a smaller, tighter canvas, but it’s as concentrated an examination of splintered human nature as its predecessor was expansive, a finely whittled modernist short story rather than a Chekhovian drama. It moves at what you might call a brisk ramble, agitated but alive to the space and scent and beauty of its surroundings, before an ending that stops you dead in your tracks, and makes you mentally retrace all your steps to that point. It’s impossible to discuss in spoiler-free fashion, but oh-so-eminently discussable, and of a piece with the serene severity of the film around it.
EVIL DOES NOT EXIST (2023) Written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi | Shot by Yoshio Kitagawa | Edited by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Azusa Yamazaki
Now playing in selected UK cinemas.