A quiet, spare film from the director of Drive My Car, Japan’s first Best Picture Oscar nominee, turns an environmental fable into folk horror.
I spent a lot of time contemplating the title of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film Evil Does Not Exist. It still echoes in my brain, as I watch and rewatch the film. It’s a puzzle to turn over, a bitter lozenge lodged in my cheek. It’s almost farcical, how banal the movie’s premise is: a talent agency wants to set up a glamping site in a remote Japanese village, and sends two hapless PR reps to sell the community on the plan. Most of us don’t contemplate the nature of evil when considering glamping, you know? But maybe we should.
At its most obvious, Evil Does Not Exist is an environmentalist fable. Hamaguchi, who previously directed Drive My Car, moves at a languid pace, and the sparseness of his script means that, on a plot level, few things happen in this movie. The film is built around a 20-minute town-hall meeting. Otherwise, it mostly follows Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower raising a young daughter, Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) and earning 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 doing. Hamaguchi is happy to have the camera follow Takumi at a comfortable distance as he goes about his day.
Through Takumi’s eyes, the audience gets a clear point of view on the community reaction to the agency’s plans for a glamping development, as the locals articulate their relationship with the environment and how the project would destroy that.
