The Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi has emerged in recent years as one of the leading voices of world cinema, most notably with his 2021 one-two punch of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car; the latter won the Best International Film Oscar and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.
Hamaguchi has returned with Evil Does Not Exist, a quieter and of-the-moment story. The winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last year, Evil Does Not Exist is much shorter than the three-hour Drive My Car—the new movie was initially conceived as a 30-minute film—and tells what feels like a small story but ends up about much more. The film’s an ecological parable, although it doesn’t really look or feel anything like what that description implies. The key is its subtlety.
Evil Does Not Exist is set in Mizubiki, a fictional village in what looks like rural Japan. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) lives in the town with his young daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), who chops wood with an axe and does frequent odd jobs for his neighbors. In the meantime, mysterious gunshots keep going off in the background. The pristine town is facing a potential crisis, as a real estate company is proposing to build a “glamping” (glamorous camping) resort in the village, accurately described by one detractor as a “camping-themed hotel.”
The long scene in which Takahashi and Mayuzumi (Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani) try to make the case for the resort to the skeptical villagers is the best of its kind since Radu Jude’s Bad Luck Banging (Or: Loony Porn).
Speaking of Jude, the depiction in a subsequent scene of a meeting of this soulless corporation brings to mind the corporate villains from that Romanian filmmaker’s follow-up, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World, which recently arrived stateside. We’re told that they must move forward with this town-destroying project because they’re counting on pandemic subsidies that will soon expire.
From that plot description, once again, it’s very to imagine the version of Evil Does Not Exist that Hollywood would probably give us: Salt-of-the-Earth townspeople face off against a faceless corporate entity, and good triumphs over evil, mostly thanks to some Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style speechifying. It also probably would’ve introduced us to the “glampers,” and played it for comedy or social satire. If Adam McKay or someone like him made that movie, it would bash the audience over the head with these themes.
That isn’t how things go down in Hamaguchi’s film, which is more concerned with allegory, metaphor, and surprising examinations of the power of nature. The ending is a surprise and a matter of interpretation.
Evil Does Not Exist is a beautiful film, opening with a long wordless depiction of the village (Yoshio Kitagawa shot it) and featuring a haunting score by Eiko Ishibashi, who also scored Drive My Car. It may leave audiences baffled, but Evil Does Not Exist is another triumph from Ryusuke Hamaguchi.