A father (Takumi, played by Hitoshi Omika) and his young daughter (Hana, played by Ryo Nishikawa) live a near-idyllic life in a bucolic village – foraging wasabi, chopping firewood, and in their spare time, wandering through the forest to identify trees together. That is, until a proposed glamping development for Tokyoite tourists challenges their blissful existence, threatening to pollute the water supply and disturb the nearby deer. Such is the set-up of Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to the acclaimed Drive My Car.
The old ‘paving paradise to put up a parking lot’ plot may sound blaringly familiar, the stuff of lazy sitcom and cartoon spin-offs, but there are few clichés that a deft enough hand can’t reprogramme into something magical. Take Bill Forsyth’s big-hearted 1980s comedy-drama Local Hero, which flips the stereotype with its starry-eyed oil executives and opportunistic villagers, then follows their character development to a quiet but profoundly affecting conclusion.
Hamaguchi may have one of the deftest directorial hands going, but Evil Does Not Exist is a very different film, with little in the way of soft edges or impish humour. It’s darker, too, than Drive My Car, which itself was far from shy on the solemnity front. A sharp winter chill cuts through it as surely as the river from which Takumi and Hana collect their water, and as pervasively as the almost science-fictional pale blue light which seems to suffuse this outdoor world.
As soon as we are met with the opening image, a movement through a canopy of jagged branches against a stark white sky, Eiko Ishibashi’s remarkable music seeds a sure but subtle sense of unease. The film had its origins in a visual companion piece to Ishibashi’s work, and its main theme – a beautifully wistful beginning swelling to something more conventionally cinematic before becoming tinged with rumbling tension – seems as though it could have inspired the film’s whole structure.
This first act is filled with slow, sprawling takes. A substantial amount of time passes before we hear a word of dialogue spoken, but those sumptuous shots of golden wheat, rushing streams, and crisp white snow never lose our attention. Reminiscent of Hamaguchi’s last film, several tracking shots appear to be filmed from the back of a moving car, leaving us to appreciate the landscapes via the detached, touristic perspective of transit.
It feels very telling that the corporate video presented to the locals begins with a shot of woodland similar to the film’s opening. As we savour this iconography from the comfort of a cinema seat, we’re not all that different from the tourists who may, or may not, end up destroying the villagers’ livelihood.
Still, he keeps the viewers on their toes. When these reveries are rudely interrupted by the grinning skeleton of a wild deer, we are reminded that natural beauty as an individualised force for wellbeing is a selective, artificially glossy concept. In one ominous shot, Hana, with a child’s bold curiosity, meets the gaze of another of these deer. The pristine glitter of an icy lake looks as precarious as it does photogenic.
It’s a testament to Hamaguchi’s immense skill that he can place the viewer on the same level as the film’s most destructive ‘characters’ without coming across as mean-spirited. As anyone who’s seen Drive My Car will know, the director’s unusually daring, rigorous, and unsentimental level of compassion is one of his greatest strengths. Asked about the film’s title, he stated, ‘Even if the cycle of nature contains the synthesis of all the desires of living things and the numerous movements of non-living things, you can’t find something that you can call “evil” to exist there’.
The film’s characterisation exemplifies this. Just after we’ve watched a maddening episode in which Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), a couple of achingly slick company representatives, try to pacify the unyielding locals into accepting the plans for the glamping site, we are forced to share a long car journey with them in one of Hamaguchi’s beloved driving scenes. As we listen in to their conversation, we find our well-stoked contempt ebbing away into cautious empathy – a masterful volte-face.
If Evil Does Not Exist were the same sort of film as Local Hero, it would be easy to work out what happens next. As Takahashi and Mayuzumi’s character arcs grow to take the plot’s reins, their lack of essential malevolence becomes all the more evident. A scene in which one character patiently teaches the other to chop wood is too clinically matter-of-fact to be touching, but it leaves the viewer contemplating the potential truth of its title. It suggests that perhaps the real tragedy is not that human beings are evil, either as a whole or individually, but that casual cruelty can so easily be enacted by people who have the capacity for great goodness.
And then – then – the ending takes that frail glow of connection and punches a hole straight through it. There doesn’t need to be a word spoken for us to feel the ice-cold shock of those extraordinarily haunting final images, which are so striking they leave you reconsidering the whole genre of the film you’ve just watched. Like all great twists the conclusion is utterly unexpected, but in hindsight, feels inevitable.
Despite all that Everything Does Not Exist has led us to believe, such an ending seems to nod to the mystical trope of nature as a vengeful karmic force after all. But where that idea so often implies that humanity is somehow separate, an aberrant interruption of the natural order of things, Hamaguchi uses it to suggest the exact opposite. If evil does not exist in nature, then neither can it be a part of humanity. But if the title has it the wrong way round, then it must necessarily live in all of us. Where does the director land on this question? That’s not the point. The point is, where do you?
Evil Does Not Exist is currently in UK cinemas, and will be released in the US on Friday 3rd May – see UK screening times here
Evil Does Not Exist on IMDb
Ryusuke Hamaguchi on IMDb
Review by Poppy Bristow
Stills from Evil Does Not Exist, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
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