EVIL DOES NOT EXIST - Mark Reviews Movies

Evil Does Not Exist, Sideshow / Janus Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 2, 2024

Everything moves slowly in the village at the heart of Evil Does Not Exist. It's a place where time itself doesn't seem to matter much, or at least, that's the case for the film's protagonist Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), the widowed father of an 8-year-old girl and a self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades. The man's day amounts to chopping firewood, gathering water from a stream in the forest, and eventually remembering that he has to pick up his daughter from school. It's not that he doesn't care, obviously. Time just gets away from him, because his life has no schedule otherwise.

Writer/director Ryusuke Hamaguchi takes his time establishing this rhythm of life, from its opening shot looking up at the trees in the woods, to lengthy sequences of Takumi cutting logs with an ax and collecting spring water into a bunch of containers, and to his casual drive to his daughter's school. Upon arriving there, it's a little jarring to notice that the kids outside are standing frozen, almost as if the filmmaker has suddenly decided to indulge in some stylistic gimmickry to highlight just how differently time moves in this place. As it turns out, the young students are just playing that traffic signal game of stopping and starting on command, but it's one of those images that makes the point so clearly that it's tough to believe the choice wasn't intentional.

There's a meticulousness to the way Hamaguchi sets the scene here, and that, appropriately, carries over to the nature of the main character and the conflict that, for him and everyone in the village, pops up as if out of nowhere. One day, everyone is going about their ordinary business, and suddenly, the town's chief Suruga (Taijiro Tamura) has been given a pamphlet about a meeting that will be happening in a couple days' time. It has to do with a proposed "glamping"—or glamorous camping—site that a company wants to build just uphill of the village.

At first, no one in town knows what any of this is about, but Suruga is convinced that the last-minute announcement of the meeting doesn't bode well for the population. The company is obviously trying to limit the number of people who attend the meeting, and at dinner at Takumi's house with some other friends, the conversation might have delved into more speculation and strategy for how the villagers will act at the meeting.

However, there are more pressing matters at hand, mainly how Takumi and his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) found a particularly lovely feather while walking in the forest earlier that day. Suruga collects them to give to his adult son to use as picks for his harpsichord playing. Yes, what's important in this place isn't anything like what matters to the world outside of it.

That's the conflict here—between the way of life in the village and the aims of those who want to exploit the land for profit. It's an old tale, in other words, and the strength of Hamaguchi's film is in how subtly but thoroughly he connects us to these old, relaxed, and simpler ways of living, while making it clear that even the most relatively minor and seemingly inconsequential acts by outsiders could destroy everything about and beyond it.

It's a film, then, that is specific in its details but carries the weight of an environmentalist parable. The story's centerpiece, for example, is that meeting, in which two representatives from the company, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), present the glamping project to the villagers, who have filled the hall of the local elementary school. They explain the idea in broad terms and with a lot of corporate lingo, so as soon as someone starts asking questions about the massive septic tank that will have to be built to accommodate the site's guests, it's quickly apparent that neither of them is prepared to discuss the actual specifics of how this project will operate.

It's almost comic, in fact, as is a fly-on-the-wall look at the company's follow-up meeting about the previous meeting and the representatives' return to the village, when Takahashi suddenly decides that he wants to become part of the little community after successfully chopping a single piece of firewood. That such moments play that way show how well Hamaguchi establishes the mindset of the village and its population. That the protests at the first meeting, as various people explain how a matter as trivial to the company as a septic tank could have disastrous consequences of the village and other places downstream of it, make us think about much more than a small town's water supply get at the potency of the place as a metaphor.

Takumi, of course, sums it up best, pointing out that this land was incorporated less than a century ago, meaning that everyone is an outsider to it. The locals understand the necessity of harmony to their and the land's survival, but the real outsiders—the corporate lackeys and hunters, with their sporadic gunshots cracking through the still air, who leave wounded deer to suffer—simply don't. As things progress, an unsettling undercurrent begins to rise to the story's surface. Something will or already has upset the balance, emphasized by how Eiko Ishibashi's score (a gorgeous main theme that elicits beauty and melancholy with an eerie countermelody) ceases without warning in certain scenes.

The payoff of Evil Does Not Exist is a decided anticlimax (mostly because the assembly of the final moments is uncharacteristically clunky), but that's appropriate in its own way. This is great conflict of our time, and its resolution is still an open question.

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