Evil Does Not Exist: A Potent Japanese Eco-Fable from the Director of Drive My Car
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Evil Does Not Exist, the new film from Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a slow-burning wonder, an eco-fable of meditative beauty and menace, down-to-earth realism, and mythic resonances.
The primary characters are handyman Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower and father of a young daughter Hana (Ryô Nishikawa), who live in a rural forest village. When a couple of agents from a company called Playmode arrive from Tokyo with a pitch to open a new luxury “glamping” site, they attempt to recruit Takumi to their cause.
The first of several tonally distinct segments opens with a slowly tracking camera pointing upward to a canopy of trees while violins softly pulse on the soundtrack. After a couple of minutes, we move to ground level, where we first see Hana, a girl of about eight, dressed in winter clothes, looking upward dreamily, as she walks through the snowy woods. The reverie is broken by the whine of a chainsaw, and the music stops abruptly.
In another part of the woods, Takumi is cutting up a log mounted on a sawhorse, before splitting the pieces into firewood. He carefully stacks the wood, and he begins filling plastic jugs with spring water. Another man, Kazuo, arrives and we hear the first dialogue of the film, when he apologizes for his lateness, because of a busy lunch shift at the restaurant where he works.
As they fill jugs for the restaurant and load them into a van, the camera moves around them, observing them from different vantage points, including from the ground up, when the men discover some wild wasabi plants which Kazuo harvests for the restaurant.
At one point, they hear a gunshot in the distance. Deer hunters, they conclude, but not too close. They stop for a smoke, and Takumi suddenly remembers he’s late for picking up his daughter from daycare. The restaurant worker reminds him of something else that he has forgotten: A town meeting at 7 pm that night to discuss the new glamping proposal.
Takumi hops into his SUV and drives off quickly. When he arrives at the school, a group of children are standing frozen in poses on the roadway. Has some bizarre supernatural event happened? No, the kids are just playing a game of Green Light, Red Light.
A few minutes later, he catches up with his daughter and carries her on his shoulders through woods, identifying trees and their uses as they go along. Hana gets down to walk, and a few minutes later they come across the skeleton of a “gut shot” fawn, an animal that had been wounded but had escaped the hunter and subsequently died. As he later explains, the usually timid deer can turn violent when they are wounded.
At a restaurant dinner before the town meeting, Hana and Takumi are joined by the town mayor, a hipster student with dyed blond hair, who has gone online and learned that it’s actually a talent agency behind the “glamping” project, anxious to find a place to invest COVID relief money before a May deadline. Hana has brought a bird feather for the mayor, whose son uses the quills as plectrums for the harpsichord he is restoring.
Music is a big and constantly changing part of Evil Does Not Exist, ranging from full orchestra to electric guitar and ambient synthesizer noises, abruptly cutting to silence. In fact, the film was originally conceived as 30 minutes of video images to accompany a live electronic music performance by composer Eiko Ishibashi. Typically, the music stops when people begin to talk.
The film’s centrepiece segment is the town hall meeting, a 20-minute scene of condensed exposition and incrementally rising tension. The two professionally pleasant visitors from Tokyo are Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka), man in his late thirties, and a slightly younger woman, Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani). After presenting a peppy video aimed at potential tourists, they open things up to the villagers.
The tone is initially polite, but as more objections are raised — and the agents defer answers, equivocate, and offer hollow assurances — the energy in the room becomes increasingly antagonistic.
Kazuo points out that the septic tank won’t be big enough to accommodate all the people if the camp is at full capacity. A chef who runs the noodle house says the purity of the local spring water is essential to her restaurant.
Others worry about potential wildfires in the summer and noisy guests and insist that a caretaker must be on hand, 24 hours a day. The quiet-spoken mayor points out, in a phrase that clearly refers to a wider context than this particular project: “What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream.”
Takahashi and Mayuzumi report the bad news back to a young executive, who listens to them while sitting behind the wheel of his parked car clearly on his way to somewhere more important. He waves away their concerns and declares the meeting a success. They sought community input, which is all the authorities require and now they’ve done their work.
He suggests they offer the locals the sop of a full-time caretaker’s job. They decide that Takumi, as a trusted local with influence, will be a candidate. They’ll throw in a bottle of whisky.
En route, the two Playmode agents have one of those open, heartfelt, long-car-trip conversations that were a winning feature of the Oscar-winning Drive My Car. It turns out both agents are disgusted with this work and ready to quit.
He was a one-time actor turned talent scout turned company shill. She was a former caregiver, who was looking for a change of pace but sees the job as corrupt, But first, they’ll finish the dirty job. They meet Takumi and attempt to ingratiate themselves.
He listens politely, and persuades them to help him chop wood and haul water before they go to lunch. Takahashi, after successfully splitting a log, declares he wants to renounce his city life, to live in the country like Takumi and maybe even learn to be a caretaker.
Takahashi’s apparent conversion is a lightly comic interlude before the final act takes an abrupt tragic turn, about which not much more can be said, except that it’s nothing tacked on.
Having watched the film twice now, it’s clear to me that Hamaguchi has laid down all the breadcrumbs, in the implicit backgrounds of the characters and visual motifs, the widowed dad, the girl who likes to wander in the woods, the possibility of pollution from outside — and the deer that watch from behind groves of trees.
What we make of the title remains an open question. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Hamaguchi, said: “Simply put, while I was doing field research for the script, these words just came out of me as I was looking at the natural landscape and thinking about nature.”
Whether by design or intuition, Hamaguchi’s film is resonant with ideas drawn from Shinto, an ancient animistic Japanese belief system that has no moral absolutes but sees evil as connected to pollution, impurity, and disharmony from nature.
In Shinto, deer were traditionally regarded as the intermediates between the spiritual and material world and as the gentle-until-threatened guardians of the forest. They are unlikely to be fans of glamping.
Evil Does Not Exist. Written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Starring Hitoshi Omika, Ryô Nishikawa, Ryûji Kosaka, and Ayaka Shibutani. In theatres May 10 in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg, Hamilton, Waterloo, St. Catharines, Sudbury, Saskatoon; in Victoria May 13, and Montreal and Edmonton May 17.