Evil May Or May Not Actually Exist

For what feels like the entire first half of Evil Does Not Exist, Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s follow up to his western breakout Drive My Car, less narrative happens than in even some truer “slow cinema” turbo-arthouse works. It’s gentle and simple enough not to alienate the Oscar-minded fans of Drive My Car, a 2021 Murakami adaptation, but its Altman-like portraiture (or rather, landscaping)’s pace will certainly test them, as it embroils us in the maintenance and peaceful downtime, the “nichijou” (everyday life), of a rural Japanese town.

Only midway through, does a conflict arise, and it’s seemingly quite a common one: its residents oppose a Tokyo firm’s development in the area, a hipster magnet glam-camping or “glamping” site, fearing environmental impact. Contextually it’s an explosive scene, but it’s still a typical Hamaguchi unembellished conference room stenograph. From there, the story of the hapless middlemen charged with giving the company’s presentation and absorbing the locals’ criticism begins, revealing their non-Evil, decent nature as they too take up the village’s cause with their callous Tokyo corporatespeak employers (our first hint that the title may not be completely genuine). But the film’s complexity is only beginning. 

While Evil Does Not Exist appears on paper to be quite a plain and earnest film, with a conflict bordering on stock, what alters it is less its glacial pace and more its nagging sense of unease. In the superlong establishing act, Hamaguchi isn’t just attaching us to an idyllic scene whose preservation we wish to root for against a threat, he’s planting worry seeds within that supposed tranquil, innocent eden. A big factor here is lead character Takumi. He’s an enigma; he’s a good father and a community man, but his mountain stoicism obscures him. There’s nothing suspicious; we’ve all seen his nonplussed, workmanlike blue collar demeanor in reality before, but that’s nearly all he or the film allows himself to show: an instinct-bound lynchpin cog in his emotional and social ecosystem.

Hamaguchi’s approach is just too elusive, despite its clinical cataloguing, to morally correlate as simply with the narrative or characters. An even bigger factor is the vaunted, aligment-amorphous score by Eiko Ishibashi, who returns from Drive My Car. Its shifty refusal of traditional emotional evocation disrupts our expected imposition of a man/nature dichotomy. It sounds like a different cliche to say “its only ethic is nature”, but it’s all so poetic and so neutral that it truly beguiles, especially on that auditory level. 

Most crucially, there’s a final complication. The last scene of the film is so stupefying that it defies both unspoken “twist” retconning and pure surrealist symbology, though to the extent there’s a solution reading it either way will at least help. We won’t spoil it here, but as suggested by the narrative’s nicety and the score’s perturbed amorality, something wicked does indeed come down the pipe. In that scene, established motivations unhinge, and spacially discoherent staging suggests an ironic chaos, an appeal to sheer absurdity, that being the fundamental, unknowable raison d’etre of Nature. If nature allows savage animal acts in the name of self preservation, which itself is contradictorily tied to inherent evolutionary progress, does Evil Exist? What proportion of malice-to-reason might define it in a fully human context? This most baffling scene, and film, of the year will have you scouring reviews (and, hopefully not, “explainers”) for an answer. But its very point is likely that there is none. 

A question that does remain is, does the disruption help the film substantially defy its slightness and its platitudes, or do they persist? It’s a concern that nagged Drive My Car as well, a three-hour picture that too inflected its lightest of drama with single scene shock and awe and musical meditation.  He wants to present, then buck traditional narrative and character tensions, but he still needs to draw them more completely than he does in the relatively tropey Evil Does Not Exist for his work to be more than oddball experimentation. Still, there’s really no one else in the world doing what he does.