EVIL DOES NOT EXIST: Ryusuke Hamaguchi Unleashes the Invidious Present
The Japanese director's latest film reasserts cinema's capacity to unveil hidden ferity.
“Water always flows downhill. What you do upstream will end up affecting those living downstream.”
Evil Does Not Exist, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s newest film, articulates the dynamic and unpredictable modes in which cinema can harness a formerly unspoken zeitgeist and, in doing so, illuminate the present. Hamaguchi caught his international break in 2021 with Drive My Car, an adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story Men Without Women. Hamaguchi’s contemplative film explored the knowability of human character and grief, becoming the first Japanese feature ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar and winning Best International Feature Film.
Its most revelatory crux, however, was that of communication, both verbal and non-verbal. Using an in-film production of Uncle Vanya by Russian playwright Anton Chekov, Hamaguchi investigates the intricacies of human interaction. To successfully perform the play, Hamaguchi’s characters, and therefore his actors, must transcend language barriers, learning to work collaboratively when conveying the story’s emotional truths—without necessarily speaking words.
Hamaguchi directed a second film released in 2021, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, departing from the dense but linear nature of Drive My Car. This time, Hamaguchi adopted an anthology structure—a triptych centred on three individual characters, driven by their respective desires and regrets. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy did not engender interest from a mass audience despite the broad success of Drive My Car only months earlier.
While it was awarded the Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize at the Berlin International Film Festival, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy needed to attract the substantive critical engagement befitting of it. Despite having less time to devote to each central figure, Hamaguchi demonstrated an extraordinary talent for incisively and empathetically drawing out their inner worlds. Together, Hamaguchi’s 2021 films distinguished the director as among the best and most searching storytellers of contemporary cinema.
Evil Does Not Exist, Hamaguchi’s 2023 masterstroke, has achieved a handful of praise among critics. Yet, the director’s latest film has again failed to garner the widespread interest grasped by his Oscar winner. Where Drive My Car concerns loss and connection, Evil Does Not Exist is described as an ‘ecofable’. This picture signifies the film’s allongé with nature and near-mythic essence while flattening its acuity. This is not to say that fables lack asperity. Hamaguchi’s film brings to mind the Jātaka tales of Indian Buddhist origin, which deal sharply with ecological equilibrium and the importance of human morality. Punishment is frequently visited in these tales upon those who violate ethical and environmental virtue. What this shorthand omits, though, is the inescapable nowness of Evil Does Not Exist.
For one, it is the rare contemporary film (alongside Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon and Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi) containing any reference to the coronavirus pandemic. Much like in our world, this epochal event has faded into the background whilst stealthily continuing to define society’s structure and emotional ennui. Instead of engaging in the pandemic erasure practised by most directors—a kind of cinematic revanchism, evasively leveraging film to return to an irrecoverable status quo ante—Hamaguchi encodes its lasting ramifications directly into the central conflict of Evil Does Not Exist. After a protracted opening act, inculcating us to the rhythm of local “odd job” man and widower Takumi’s (Hitoshi Omika) everyday life, upheaval arrives in Mizubiki village in the form of outsiders.
The intruders come as representatives of a talent agency turned real estate developer, hoping to rort government COVID subsidies and bearing the appropriately infantile name ‘Playmode’. Hamaguchi’s patient observation of Takumi’s rustic lifestyle—foraging wild wasabi, chopping firewood, collecting spring water for the community udon restaurant—set to Eiko Ishibashi’s beguiling score is interrupted by a town meeting. The townsfolk are assembled by the company (to appear ‘consultative’ while allowing residents to blow off steam), only to level blistering criticisms of its plan to establish a “glamping” resort in their village.
In a brief but telling transition, Takumi’s eight-year-old daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), who we are introduced to via her perambulations through the nearby woodland, bemusedly peers inside the town hall’s glass doors. Where previously Hamaguchi extended a cinematographically splendid tracking shot, acquainting us with Hana’s curiosity and her surroundings, now it takes only a few seconds for the film to abandon her perspective. Children—even those keenly invested in nature—are excluded from decisions about its preservation and their future. It is not only the will of youth set to be sidelined, though.
As soon as the actors-turned-managers representing Playmode have finished playing a virtually parodic advertisement for their glamping ground, townspeople launch into their misgivings: the septic tank’s insufficient capacity and positioning is bound to contaminate their water, a lack of supervision will lead to reckless visitors igniting deadly fires, and touristification will practically sap their “purpose” for living in the region. Each time, they are met with inflexible, almost scripted responses from Playmode employees Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani).
The meeting oscillates uncomfortably between the sincere, conscientious pleadings of denizens and the performativity of Takahashi, who fails to leverage his showbiz charm to assuage the residents’ qualms. As such, Hamaguchi reconstructs a case study for our real predicament. Mizubiki residents are told what we are: it is “mutually beneficial” for our lives and the dwindling residuum of nature to be at the mercy of artificial corporations—parasitically glomming from one fad to the next.
This pivotal scene recalls the rehearsal sequences from Drive My Car, with Hamaguchi contrasting the ‘circular’ room arrangement of Uncle Vanya table reads, to the diametric assemblage of the town hall, where Takahashi and Mayuzumi face down Mizubiki’s inhabitants. In effect, Hamaguchi blooms his study of performativity, from that found within personal relations or art to the characteristic theatricality of our political juncture. It is one of many sublime moments through which we experience Hamaguchi’s concerted stylistic evolutions, subtle and overt, during Evil Does Not Exist.
Indeed, the casting of non-trained crew member Hitoshi Omika in the leading role of Takumi encapsulates Hamaguchi’s relentless drive to innovate with his filmmaking. This unconventional choice cultivates a dual brilliance that exemplifies the film’s tantalising indefinability. First, Hamaguchi maximises what he judged as Omika’s “difficult to read” face, further densening an already enigmatic screenplay. Second, Omika’s deep familiarity with the production informs his utterly convincing portrayal of the laconic Takumi, giving the character an embodied, seemingly empirical existence.
Hamaguchi’s deployment of Ishibashi’s original score is the most striking development. Evil Does Not Exist is an inversion of the duo’s initial idea, where Hamaguchi intended to produce a short film to accompany Ishibashi’s live performances, who also scored Drive My Car. The partners resolved that Ishibashi’s compositions should give rise to a feature-length screenplay. The opening intertitle of Evil Does Not Exist is distinctly reminiscent of dozens employed throughout late French director Jean-Luc Godard’s filmography. Ishibashi’s score is made to function similarly to those of Godard, with Hamaguchi telling Cahiers du Cinéma that the pair aimed “not to use music to control the audience’s emotions but to awaken its sensibility”. Likewise, Ishibashi pointed to Godard as a “common reference” for their “desire for a fair sharing between image and music”.
Their inspiration is pronounced: the entrancing roundelay that plays during the film’s many sequences in the woods both lingers and is repeatedly, abruptly withdrawn, giving way to ambient stimuli of the rural setting. As in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, and Pierrot le Fou, this auditory fragmentation and discontinuity hints that something is awry, denying us the expected tonal resolution invariably granted by orthodox cinema. A single piece of music presents in sequences of bucolic beauty and those foreboding or carrying devastation.
Ishibashi’s theme is itself constructed dialectically, with smooth opening strings gradually revealing a stentorian undercurrent. In fusing discordant sounds, Ishibashi incites doubt in Mizubiki’s apparent serenity. The uncanny modularity of Ishibashi’s score creates a counter-narrative, achieving distinct emotional resonances from the imagery on screen. For instance, as Hana observes deer from afar, the very same theme that twinges with danger later coats her dreams in calm.
This mantra—to be maximally inclusive of the moral, spiritual, and environmental lacery endemic to life but liquefied by modernity—extends out from Ishibashi’s score, permeating all of Evil Does Not Exist. When it becomes abundantly clear to the villagers that Takahashi and Mayuzumi are unable to address their glamping site fears meaningfully, Takumi grants them something of a reprieve, instructing them to hold another meeting once they have removed the layers of bureaucracy between the townsfolk and Playmode’s decision-makers. This is curious, as Takumi is seen sitting with a subterranean furore throughout the meeting whilst also acting to restrain a particularly embittered friend and resident. Takumi’s contradictory decree gives rise to the events of the film’s second half, which shifts toward characterising Takahashi and Mayuzumi.
Upon returning to Playmode’s Tokyo office—a tiny basement designed solely to support Google Meet sessions—the pair are understandably reluctant to return to Mizubiki without meeting the demands of its people. Despite their protestations, their bosses (Takuma Nagao and Yoshinori Miyata) enlist them to sell a half-baked compromise. While Playmode will not risk losing access to subsidies by delaying the project and have no budget leeway, they will offer Takumi the role of camp steward—they will attempt to buy him off.
Hamaguchi opts to enforce the travel time of the car ride back to Mizubiki, leading to an ample reveal of Takahashi’s casual sexism and ludicrous, post-pandemic fetishisation of ‘simpler’ rural life. Even now, Hamaguchi resists crude condemnation, introducing uneasy pity toward Takahashi concurrent to unfurling his neuroses. By imposing the duration of the urban-to-rural travel, Hamaguchi materialises the distance between the two lifestyles whilst continuing his elongation of time—cutting against our hurried daily reality. Space is also afforded for Mayuzumi to endear herself to the audience as an avatar of a less kitschy, more relatable liminality: she cannot settle in a career, finding herself stuck between drifting or remaining in a humiliating job.
Shortly after arriving back in Mizubiki, Takahashi begins cloying for what he believes is an excellent opportunity to shift his life to the countryside, subverting the pair’s mission to convince Takumi to caretake the camp. Instead, Takahashi wishes to take on the role, escaping the city and establishing a more masculine, self-sufficient existence. Sensing a chance to turn pests into “helpers”, Takumi demonstrates his quiet cunning by stringing the outsiders along, getting them to restore the udon restaurant’s stocks of spring water.
Ishibashi’s score returns, indicating the authentically curative effects of completing meditative tasks within nature. But it is Mayuzumi, not Takahashi, who begins internalising this lesson, taking her time to carefully fill each tub while her callow colleague hurriedly ferries them back to the truck. As they relax after loading the water, Mayuzumi resolves that this is the last thing she does before quitting Playmode. It is the film’s final moment of sublimity.
In the context of Evil Does Not Exist, this is a monumental sequence, marking the first revolution of Takumi’s routine since the “balance” of the area was disrupted by opportunistic outsiders. This pristine water is the pride and joy of Mizubiki and the primary source of its rejection of the fatuous Playmode glamping site. In this way, Hamaguchi’s film resembles the Rukkhadhamma Jātaka, a fable Buddha imparted to his clan while they clashed with one another over vital water rights. Buddha counselled that such discord weakened both clans as they both required water and, much like trees, would be more resilient when working together to survive the trials of nature:
“United, forest-like, should kinsfolk stand;
The storm o’erthrows the solitary tree.”
Like Buddha, the village chief of Mizubiki (Taijirô Tamura) warns during the town meeting that a chord of respect should be struck between the parties to avoid disputes. To achieve this, “the people upstream have to take the blame” for the downstream consequences of their actions. The chief’s remarks posit an inverted ‘trickle-down economics’, cautioning would-be capitalists that rapacious profit-seeking invites blowback. Soon after, when Hana presents him with a feather she collected while frolicking in a field clear of the woods, the chief sternly exhorts that she must not go there alone.
But the fragile environmental and social equipoise has already been destabilised. After loading up the water, Takumi realises that he has again forgotten to pick Hana up from school. Anticipating this, Hana has gone walkabout in the woods. In the initial search, Mayuzumi puts herself about, earning a deep cut in the palm of her hand. After Takumi bandages Mayuzumi’s wound, apologising for his supervisory oversight, Takahashi insists on joining Takumi to continue searching for Hana—an effort undertaken by the entire village.
The sweep of the woods lasts through the night, and it is not until the following morning that Takumi and Takahashi stumble into the field from within the tree line. They are confronted with an impossible situation: Hana is seated just metres from two deer—a fawn and its distressed, gut-shot guardian. Before a plan can be hatched, Hana rises to her feet, removes her beanie, and innocently approaches the deer. Suddenly, the film’s simmering, menacing undertone of ferity erupts into the open and beyond the readily decipherable.
It is possible to understand as the culmination of the “anger” Ishibashi felt while making the film, “directed towards the way humans work, the unfairness of this whole world”. Yet something more than mere tragedy remains at the conclusion of Evil Does Not Exist. Anger needs a destination—it must go somewhere, tempt something. As Ishibashi put it, “Anger is one source of energy that compels me forward – that includes the sense of friction I feel when I face society, and friction I feel towards my own self”.