I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the title of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film Evil does not exist. It still echoes in my head when I watch and rewatch the movie. It’s a puzzle to turn around, there’s a bitter lozenge in my cheek. It’s almost ridiculous how banal the film’s premise is: a talent agency wants to set up a glamping site in a remote Japanese village and sends two hapless PR representatives to sell the community on the plan. Most of us do not consider the nature of evil when we think about it 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 slow pace, and the sparseness of its script means that very little happens on a plot level in this film. The film is built around it a 20 minute town hall meeting. Otherwise, it mainly follows Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower raising a young daughter, Hana (Ryô Nishikawa), and making a living by doing odd jobs in his mountain village. He collects water from a well for a local restaurant, splits firewood and does the rest. Hamaguchi is happy that the camera follows Takumi from a comfortable distance as he goes about his day.
Through Takumi’s eyes, the audience gets a clear sense of the community’s response to the agency’s plans for a glamping development, as locals articulate 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 strictly optics. No one cares what the villagers think.
And the owner of the agency – who can’t be bothered to show up at the town hall himself – doesn’t even seem that invested in the glamping project. The company’s goal is not to expand into recreational services, but to obtain pandemic subsidies from the government to boost its bottom line. You could call that malicious.
Image: Sideshow and Janus Films
Hamaguchi started working on it Evil does not exist with the intention of creating a visual work of art to accompany the work of musician Eiko Ishibashi, who also composed the score for Drive my car. Even expanded into a 106-minute feature film, Evil does not exist retains the feel of an abstract tone poem, more about what the viewer has to say in response than anything the filmmaker puts on screen. The moral self-evidence of the film’s central conflict therefore feels like a trick: a sleight of hand, a dare to look closer.
It’s easy to idealize Takumi’s life, as Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka), one of the agency’s 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 fantasizes about running away and just living in Takumi’s village, talking about how good it feels to chop wood, to do something with his hands.
Image: Sideshow and Janus Films
Both Takumi and Takahashi – like everyone else in the village, as you and 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 on which it depends . It is possible to be respectful of that world, as a village elder says during the town hall, pointing out the community’s responsibility to think of everything downstream. But it’s arrogant to think we really are to understand the wilderness around us. To behave as if we belong.
In this, Evil does not exist tends towards a folk horror tradition, while Hamaguchi slowly turns away from the down-to-earth naturalism and builds up to an impressionistic, opaque finale. The provocation of the film’s title echoes through the forest, where the film begins and ends with a view from below. Maybe that’s what the title is referring to. Perhaps it is a whisper resounding through and from the ground itself, about how foolish it is to believe that the earth, even in its silence and beauty, has any respect for our moral attitude towards it. Perhaps we should be more careful and fearful when packing. Maybe evil only matters because we’re here to think about it, and when we’re gone, that’s how it will be.
Evil does not exist opened in limited theatrical release on May 3, with a wider rollout on May 10 and beyond.