The final moments of Evil Does Not Exist have proven divisive, but you won’t be able to successfully argue that Ryusuke Hamaguchi hasn’t tried to prepare you for them. From the opening moments to his latest effort, a prize winner at the recent Venice and London film festivals, it feels like the director is consciously trying to embed a sense of comfort within the audience that will prepare them for the abruptness of events about to unfold. As his camera slowly glides through a snowy forest, facing up to the heavens, we’re gently guided along by the comforting sounds of Eiko Ishibashi’s score, this establishing sequence unfolding for far longer than expected until, unexpectedly, the music stops. We’re left in that space ever so slightly longer, but a simple artistic change leaves it feeling unusually alien. 

This speaks to the director’s original intentions with the film, to make a dialogue-free, half-hour short in the village of Harasawa, near where the composer grew up, scored to her orchestrations – using the silence between songs to aid the visuals as much as the music itself. The way the project gestated is hardly unusual for the filmmaker – his five-and-a-half-hour international breakthrough Happy Hour notably began life as an acting workshop – but the pace at which it found its new form is still unusual; filming took place in March, roughly six months before it premiered to the world. It’s a strange conception fitting for a movie equal parts beguiling and bewildering, keeping viewers at arm’s length where his most recent efforts have slowly pulled you in. 

That distancing technique is apparent in the way it introduces us to Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a labourer in the village we first see chopping wood, silently observing the mundane process of an average work routine. Only gradually do we learn of the existential threat faced by this natural land, due to an events company from Tokyo selecting the location to build a glamping site, much to the ire of residents – not due to any frustrations with tourists, but with the ill-thought through ecological effects this would have on the natural environment and their water supply. This all comes to a head at a fraught town hall meeting, where two well-meaning but under-researched representatives from the development company aim to address local concerns.  

Most movies would make this centrepiece, in which the residents outline their righteous frustrations with the development project, into a simplistic “us vs. them” tale, which Hamaguchi has very little interest in; it’s this decision that will temporarily reassure you that the film’s title is a deliberate statement of intent. Rather than being corporate stooges, we spend time with the two representatives following the meeting, learning about their frustrations of being middle-men, tasked with listening to concerns their boss will bat aside. They aren’t soulless caricatures, but people with genuine empathy irritated by their job’s restrictions at letting them show it and offer any meaningful reassurance to the locals – the phrase “evil does not exist” here appearing to reflect that, even within parties that have a negative agenda, the reality is far more complicated than simple villainy. 

By this point, this reviewer was already patting themselves on the back for having gotten a handle on the director’s thesis, only to have it thrown back in their face by the climax. What actually transpires in the third act won’t be discussed here, but it’s difficult to talk about Hamaguchi’s latest effort without alluding to the sudden moment, seemingly unhinted at within the drama, that confuses everything that came before – even if the film was using specific stylistic tics to prepare the audience for such drastic movements. In his recent work, most specifically the wonderful Drive My Car, Hamaguchi has carefully teased out the innermost emotions of people holding themselves at a remove from the world. Evil Does Not Exist feels like a film made in direct response to it in the way that certain characters leave their cards close to their chest, opting for further confusion instead of catharsis.  

Other critics have heralded this as another masterpiece which continues the director’s strong recent run, but its very deliberately orchestrated messiness fell a little flat for me. It’s the sort of film that will either make or break based on a second viewing, revealing whether there are any inner secrets within the drama we initially failed to detect, or if this was nothing more than an attempt to illicit shocked reactions, putting to screen an act no reading of the film would ever be able to rationalise within the narrative. This is the first Hamaguchi film that left me cold – although, I suspect, he wouldn’t entirely be displeased with it having that effect. 

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Written by Alistair Ryder

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