‘Evil Does Not Exist’ review: Frightening questions, no answers

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the title of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film Evil doesn’t exist. It still echoes in my brain as I watch the film over and over again. It’s a puzzle to turn, a bitter lollipop stuck in my cheek. It’s almost farcical how banal the film’s premise is: A talent agency wants to build a glamping site in a remote Japanese village and sends two hapless PR reps to sell the plan to the community. Most of us don’t think about the nature of evil when we think about it Glamping, You know? But maybe we should.

The most obvious is, Evil doesn’t exist is an environmentalist fable. Hamaguchi, who previously directed Drive my carIt moves at a sluggish pace and the sparseness of its script means that few things happen on a plot level in this film. The film is structured around this a 20-minute town hall meeting. Otherwise, it’s mostly about Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower who is raising a young daughter, Hana (Ryô Nishikawa), and making a living doing odd jobs in his mountain village. He collects water from a spring for a local restaurant, splits firewood, and does whatever else needs to be done. Hamaguchi is glad that the camera follows Takumi from a comfortable distance as he goes about his day.

Through Takumi’s eyes, the audience is given a clear view of the community’s reaction to the agency’s plans for a glamping project, as locals express their relationship with the environment and how the project would destroy it. However, it’s pretty clear that the agency’s interest in community input is purely for optics. Nobody really cares what the villagers think.

And the owner of the agency – who doesn’t bother to show up at town hall himself – doesn’t even seem particularly invested in the glamping project. The company’s stated goal is not to expand into leisure services, but to obtain pandemic grants from the government to increase its profits. You could call that evil.

Hamaguchi started working Evil doesn’t exist with the intention of creating a visual work of art that accompanies the work of musician Eiko Ishibashi, for whom the score was also composed Drive my car. Even expanded into a 106-minute feature film, Evil doesn’t exist maintains the feel of an abstract tone poem, more concerned with what the viewer has to say in response than anything the filmmaker puts on screen. The moral obviousness of the film’s central conflict therefore seems like a trick – a sleight of hand, a challenge to take a closer look.

It’s easy to idealize Takumi’s life, as Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka), one of the agency representatives, does when he meets him. Takahashi and his colleague Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) return to the village after the town hall meeting goes badly, with instructions to offer Takumi a job at the glamping site so he can convince the other villagers to support the development. However, Takahashi dreams of running away and just living in Takumi’s village, raving about how good it feels to chop wood and do something with his hands.

Both Takumi and Takahashi, like everyone in the village, as you or I would be if we were in front of Hamaguchi’s camera, are still strangers to the natural world around which this fictional village is built and upon which it depends. It is possible to be respectful of this world, as a village elder says during the town hall meeting, pointing out the community’s responsibility to think about everything that lies downstream. But it’s arrogant to think that we really are understand the wilderness around us. Acting like we belong.

In this, Evil doesn’t exist leans toward a folk horror tradition as Hamaguchi slowly moves away from dispassionate naturalism and builds toward an impressionistic, opaque finale. The provocation of the film’s title echoes through the forest, which the film views from below at the beginning and end. Maybe that’s what the title is all about. Perhaps it is a whisper that echoes through and from the Earth itself, speaking of how foolish it is to believe that the Earth, even in its silence and beauty, has any regard for our moral stance toward it. Maybe we should be more careful and careful when taking it. Maybe evil only matters because we’re here to think about it, and when we’re gone, it will be gone.

Evil doesn’t exist was released in limited release in theaters on May 3rd, with a wider release on May 10th and beyond.