Evil Does Not Exist review – beau­ti­ful­ly precise

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist opens beneath a canopy of trees, stripped bare by win­ter. We glide for­ward with our gaze fixed upwards at their branch­es, grey and thread­like against the uni­form light of the sky. In a return­ing col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ham­aguchi after Dri­ve My Car, com­pos­er Eiko Ishibashi’s tremu­lous string score dis­lodges some­thing ten­der with­in your chest, like a stone being knocked loose at the mouth of a river.

We spend a lot of time look­ing. So does Hana, a young girl wear­ing a striped beanie and tiny, tiny yel­low gloves (played by a preter­nat­u­ral­ly ground­ed Ryo Nishikawa). Her father Taku­mi (Hitoshi Omi­ka of Wheel of For­tune and Fan­ta­sy) is an unsmil­ing, qui­et man who shares his daughter’s obser­va­tion­al gaze and car­ries out odd jobs here in Mizu­bi­ki Vil­lage, just two hours out­side of Tokyo. Some­times togeth­er, some­times alone, this is what they see: Wild wasabi, sprout­ing unruly on the incline of a small hill. Clear moun­tain springs, rush­ing play­ful­ly over mossy stones. The skele­ton of a fawn, felled by an unknown hunter. There will be only two gun­shots heard in this film, and they are monumental.

Evil Does Not Exist has some­thing grand, almost pros­e­lytis­ing about its title. So it’s per­haps odd at first that Hamaguchi’s beau­ti­ful­ly pre­cise film – so restrained and exact­ing that its dénoue­ment is noth­ing less than earth-shat­ter­ing – is about glamp­ing. Rel­a­tive to the affect­ing beau­ty of this vil­lage and the easy ways its peo­ple and envi­ron­ment tan­gle togeth­er, it’s an instinc­tive­ly ugly con­cept. As we soon realise after the actors repeat­ed­ly form their lips around its clum­sy syl­la­bles, ​‘glamp­ing’ is an ugly word, too: a mutt of urban cap­i­tal­ism, con­sum­ing things fun­da­men­tal­ly incom­pat­i­ble with its diges­tive system.

When two Tokyo tal­ent agency rep­re­sen­ta­tives arrive in Mizu­bi­ki to brief its res­i­dents about a glamp­ing site they’re con­struct­ing as a com­pa­ny retreat, we realise why Ham­aguchi spends so much time entreat­ing us to qui­et­ly gaze at the land­scape. Mizubiki’s ecol­o­gy is placed in the cen­tre of the frame: a pheas­ant feath­er held up to the sun­light, an expanse of white snow gen­tly marred by deer tracks. These com­po­si­tions nev­er feel like back­drops, but a way for the land to com­mu­ni­cate with us through the cam­era – reori­ent­ing our time, atten­tion, and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty in rela­tion to it. The film’s char­ac­ters some­times look direct­ly at us, like we take the place of the wild wasabi or the deer skull.

So when the Tokyo lack­eys arrive with an adver­tise­ment for the glamp­ing project accom­pa­nied by some calm­ing roy­al­ty-free track, it’s grat­ing. We’re see­ing the same trees, the same crys­talline water; but as the stony faces of the vil­lagers tell us, we couldn’t be look­ing at things more dif­fer­ent­ly. ​“So much doesn’t make sense,” a young man says when the floor is opened for ques­tions, and it doesn’t – Hamaguchi’s film exca­vates exact­ly why it’s so hard to make some­one under­stand that ​“what you do upstream will affect those liv­ing down­stream”. Uttered calm­ly dur­ing a riv­et­ing back-and-forth about the site’s sep­tic tank, this tru­ism sum­mates the philo­soph­i­cal clash at the film’s heart – which in the director’s always-deft hands, slips into the super­nat­ur­al. Foren­sic calm is sub­sti­tut­ed by an implo­sive hor­ror in the film’s final min­utes – one that cuts so swift­ly you only see the blood after it’s been drawn.

So care­ful­ly and empa­thet­i­cal­ly con­struct­ed – even towards its ​“vil­lains” – that it feels miles away from didac­ti­cism, this shapeshift­ing eco­log­i­cal tale becomes a yearn­ing rumi­na­tion on the alien­ations of mod­ern life, and the qui­et­ly vio­lent seams where things in this world are chang­ing and dying rapid­ly while we lack the lan­guage to arrive at the same des­ti­na­tion, no mat­ter how much peo­ple say they’re lis­ten­ing. The Tokyo agency pro­pos­es to erect the glamp­ing site in the path of the deer trail. ​“Where would the deer go?” Taku­mi asks qui­et­ly, some­thing con­cealed in his ques­tion. ​“Some­where else, I guess,” one of the reps replies. He for­gets some­thing Taku­mi explained ear­li­er about injured deer: if they can’t run, they’ll fight back.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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