Evil Does Not Exist (dir. Ryûsuke Hamaguchi)
Director(s): Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Country: Japan
Author: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Eiko Ishibashi
Actor(s): Hitoshi Omika, Ryô Nishikawa, Ryûji Kosaka
Written by Tom Augustine.
In May, Rialto Channel is spotlighting the cinema of modern Asia, premiering four of the most significant titles to arrive from that region in recent years. Among these are The Monk and the Gun, a Bhutanese film about a monk whose path intersects with an American hunting an antique rifle in the mountains; Black Dog, the charming, sophisticated man-and-dog tale set in Northern China, the winner of last year’s Cannes’ Un Certain Regard grand prize; and Exhuma, a dread-soaked twist on ghostbusting in South Korea (and one of their most successful films of all time). All are near-essential — the crown jewel, though, is Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s defiantly strange Evil Does Not Exist, a film entirely uninterested in audience expectation or resolution in the traditional sense, and yet imbued with a deeply haunting aura that lingers long after the credits roll. The fact that the film — beginning life as a simple visual accompaniment to the music that would eventually become Evil Does Not Exist’s score, by long-time collaborator Eiko Ishibashi — seems to have been conjured into existence by accident only adds to the film’s overwhelming sense of dreamlike unknowability. Indeed, Hamaguchi himself has stated that he is still figuring out exactly what the film means to him. That a work can manage to slip from the grasp of its own creator and yet can be so poetic and infernally suggestive can only assure the viewer that it has arisen from the psyche of a great master.
The film takes place in a small, snow-bound Japanese village, where a giant real estate conglomerate is eyeing the landscape for the development of a glamping site. The potentialities of the site, the conglomerate claims, are the increase of foot traffic and tourism in the town. The downside, as laid out in the film’s centrepiece town hall sequence, is the extensive damage such a site would have to the local environment. In the mix is a local woodsman, a widower and handyman named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika, one of many first-time actors in the film) who finds himself at the forefront of resistance to the conglomerate, which is headed up by public relations cannon-fodder Takahashi and Mayuzumi (Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani), who themselves are immediately and hilariously out of their depth amongst the locals. Even as the representatives themselves begin to be swayed by the persuasiveness of the townsfolk, Takumi’s young daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) disappears, and the film takes a sinister left turn into something approaching (but never quite settling into) thriller territory.
After the sweeping success of Drive My Car, chameleonic auteur Ryûsuke Hamaguchi returns with this mysterious, elliptical meditation on small communities and climate change. Screening as part of a superb Rialto Channel spotlight series of new Asian masterworks, it is another indicator that Hamaguchi is one of the most significant cinematic voices of the 2020s.
Discussion of Evil Does Not Exist has and will inevitably continue to centre around its two most vivid sequences — the astonishing, extended town hall debate that dominates the middle third of the film, and the shocking, jarring ending sequence that’s tailor-made for heated, contrasting interpretation. And yet, Hamaguchi has constructed something audacious and beautiful to envelop these sequences, all the more remarkable for its gentle sense of off-the-cuff experimentation, as suggested by its genesis and the presence of a vast cast of non-actors. With achingly beautiful lensing by cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa, the film is slow, meditative, and yet hypnotic — bookended by lengthy shots looking up at the skeletal woodland that surrounds the village, lulling us into a suspended state of sorts. Much of the film’s tension comes from the uncanny intersection of the dreamlike and the urgently real, as Hamaguchi delves into environmental destruction and capitalist greed with a keen eye to the way both things impose themselves on modern life, particularly on the living spaces of the working class. While the film’s central visual metaphor of a wounded deer is, on its face, somewhat elusive, in the context of a world ravaged by the exploits of the über-rich class, the film’s jarring, off-rhythm ending begins to take shape, albeit in an unconventional, stridently symbolic manner.
In the process, Hamaguchi continues to define himself as Japan’s foremost young filmmaker, whose output is unified in its handsomeness and yet maintains an intoxicatingly unidentifiable atonality. Drive My Car, Hamaguchi’s most widely celebrated film, is also arguably his most accessible (and there are those who maintain his Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, released the same year, was the superior offering), including being nominated for a raft of top-line Oscars. To follow up such a success with a film this wilfully obscure and rigorously formulated, as ruggedly beautiful as a diamond in the rough, is proof that Hamaguchi is an auteur with much on his mind and many more avenues to venture down. If even the man’s B-sides possess such mastery (to the point where we call into question if they are B-sides at all), we can only wait on bated breath for what is sure to come as the decade progresses.
Evil Does Not Exist premieres on May 5 at 8:30 PM on Rialto Channel (Sky, Channel 39)