Review of Evil Does Not Exist
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s newest moves toward revelation, but never arrives
Originally posted on my Letterboxd, June 24, 2024
this is my first time ever writing a review on letterboxd. though i didn’t know much about this film before watching it, i expected to leave feeling the strange and triumphant sort of grief that his other work has moved me toward in the past. For to name a thing, to speak it out loud, to break the spell of one’s own magical thinking — be this Yusuke’s breakdown at the end of Drive My Car, where he identifies himself and his cowardice as complicit actors in his wife’s death, Asako’s final rejection of the hollow, idealized romance that Baku shows up years later to offer her in Asako I and II, Kazuaki’s relinquishment of his desire for Meiko in order to rebuild his relationship with Tsugumi in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasty — still creates within us a devastating loss, even as we find that life can go on, even as we find that real love extends beyond the realm of the imaginary. If something is not realized, it remains a possibility and therefore attainable in its abstraction; when possibility is realized, it becomes a duty, a responsibility toward others as well as oneself — such is the nature of love.
Evil Does Not Exist is Hamaguchi’s attempt at a polemic against deforestation and capitalism. But this time, it is Hamaguchi who remains occluded by the veil of fantasy, rather than his characters. We meet a sagely and mysterious jack of all trades after a talent agency comes to a small village to announce they’ll be setting up a “glamping” site that will, among other things, put the village at risk of their water sources becoming contaminated, of increasing wildfires, etc. The two representatives from the agency are city-dwellers, solipsistic in the sense they’ve put no thought into how this project might affect the tranquil existence of people living here. After a meeting with their boss, they go to ask the mysterious and sagely man from earlier to work with them as a campsite caretaker. The most interesting scene in the movie is during the car drive, where both characters reveal that they hate their jobs, that they’re lonely and directionless people who’ve long ago lost their purpose. Hamaguchi’s dialogue scenes are always fantastically executed, capturing the same rhythms and miscommunications and small, but informative revelations that we encounter in real life in our own conversations. It was probably the first time I’ve laughed at mention of a dating app in a movie.
After they arrive to where the man has instructed them to meet him, they spend some time watching him cut wood. The male worker decides to try it out, and decides it is now his life’s true calling. The three of them then go to eat some udon, where the workers share that their thoughts in regards to the project have changed since meeting him and the other inhabitants, and ask for him to consider them as apprentices of sorts.
As they’re driving to collect springwater for the udon shop together, they hear a gunshot. Alarmed, the two workers tell the man they’ve never heard a gunshot before, and he responds that it’s deer hunting season before telling them that their proposed site will go right through a deer trail. “Maybe it’ll be good for city people to interact with wildlife,” the woman worker muses. But the man quickly shuts her down by saying that wild deer dislike interacting with people, they’re quick to flee at the notion of threat. “Deer don’t attack people, do they?” One of them asks again at some other point. Which is when we get some very important seeming information: Deer will attack if they’re gutshot (wounded with a bullet) or if their children are wounded. He looks in the rear view mirror as he says this, and we’re treated to another beautiful view of the mountains outside the window as the car goes quiet.
At this point I was thinking that we would be seeing some of the Hamaguchi that I mentioned earlier, the one who manages to shift a quiet and ordered environment into a sudden fit of emotional intensity. Characters break our preconceived understandings of them, as they move outside of their archetypal roles into full and broken people whom we have no choice but to resonate with, their fears and desires and self destructive cycles all to familiar to our own.
But the characters in Evil Does Not Exist remain as archetypes, sadly. We learn nothing about the mysterious man, save for the fact that he is a single father who seems to care for his community and his daughter, Hana, very much.
SUPER BIG SPOILERS FROM HERE ON**
Even when his daughter goes missing, his emotions never get the better of him. Shortly after what seems like the beginning of a new life for the outsiders, the man realizes that he’s forgotten to pick up Hana from school. By the time we arrive, we’re told by the teacher that she’s walked home , as she often does when tired of waiting for Dad. We arrive back home only to find that Hana isn’t there. he rushes out the door, but manages to tell the woman worker that she’s free to make herself at home and eat anything she might find in his fridge.
The last part of the film shows everyone searching for Hana as the night grows darker. One begins to worry that she has been shot by the gun we heard earlier, but then we reach the deer watering hole, mostly transformed into a vast white expanse of ice in the wintertime we see Hana in front of a pair of deer, the three of them standing stock still. We zoom in on a bullet hole on the child deer, fresh blood leaking from the wound. Hana walks toward the deer, her hands outstretched.
The male worker shouts and runs to grab Hana, but before he can get to her and presumably get her killed by the now-hostile deer, Dad puts him in a chokehold and continues squeezing until foam is coming form the man’s mouth. We cut to Dad rushing away with Hana in his arms — we don’t see if the deer did in fact attack; all we know that she’s now unconscious, a small hole leaking blood now visible on her forehead — while the male worker lays unmoving on the ice. Briefly, we see him get up and stumble around before falling back down before going still. No other humans or animals are shown in the rest of the movie, all life is gone : We see the canopy of tree branches latticing the night sky, we hear the sound ofHana’s fathers breath as he carries her back home. Cut to credits.
But this is perhaps the biggest flaw of Hamaguchi’s film: We are all too removed from its subjects to feel for them beyond what we know what it is we are supposed to feel. It seems as if Hamaguchi has confused the cityfolk’s scope and his own, believing that observation is the same as experience, that the outsider only need make contact with the community in order to fully understand them. It is implied that the
protagonist’s wife has died (evidenced by one frame in which we see a photo of himself, Hana, and an unknown woman celebrating a birthday together), but what exactly is his role in the village? And larger still, in the story? Where are his complications? He’s a singular note the entire way through — strong, efficient, masterful, calm and collected while his fellow community members rage against the intruders. As mentioned previously, the two workers are just on the brink of some kind of arc, as is portended by the car scene; the man declares that he’s going to find a wife and live out the rest of his life as a rustic man in the countryside. The woman worker, too, decides that this will be her last job in working for their company. But unfortunately no one gets the say in their own conclusion, either to fight against it or accept it — rather, they’re forced into awkward and forced movements for the sake of Hamaguchi’s narrative. The more he tries to hone in on his intended message, the more the people with families and livelihoods and homes to protect disappear; the wildlife and nature, too, begin to feel more like stock images one might see on a laptop screen, rather than a place with which we can develop the kind of fierce love and protection its inhabitants share for it. Evil may exist, it may not. I still can’t parse what the film is trying to say. Perhaps it’s that at the end of the day we are bound to impulse and action based on self-protection, thereby ridding any of us from moral scrutiny. But then there’s also the big companies who threaten to swallow up peoples lives in the name of money and greed, which is actually pretty evil...?
I will look forward to watching Hamaguchi’s next film and hope for something that feels more in line with the rest of his body of work — something to catapult us into that disconcerting, fragile, and beautiful moment of rebirth that follows destruction, rather than a balm for real ecological tragedy.