Evil Does Not Exist: Hamaguchi's Quietest Provocation

Ryusuke Hamaguchi has a specific problem that most contemporary filmmakers do not have: his previous film was Drive My Car (2021), which won the Academy Award for Best International Feature and reconstructed the critical expectations for what he was next going to do. Evil Does Not Exist, released in the US in May after a late-2023 Japanese debut, is the answer, and the answer is specifically uncooperative with those expectations.

This is a film about a small Japanese mountain community, a corporate glamping development, and a sequence of specific quiet conflicts between the two. The film is, for most of its running time, about what a community looks like when it is being very slowly undermined by outside economic interests. It is also, in its final minutes, a film that refuses every cinematic gesture of resolution its setup has conditioned the viewer to expect.

What the film is doing for most of its length

The film’s central figure is Takumi, played by Hitoshi Omika, a local odd-job man in a small village a few hours from Tokyo. He chops wood. He fetches water from a specific mountain stream. He picks up his young daughter from school. He attends a community meeting, in which representatives from a Tokyo entertainment company present plans for a glamping campsite that would divert water from the stream, generate increased traffic on the local road, and change the specific ecology of the forest.

The community meeting, which runs roughly fifteen minutes of screen time, is the film’s structural spine. Hamaguchi films the meeting in long takes with specific attention to the villagers’ questions and the company representatives’ answers. The questions are specific. The answers are evasive in a specifically-corporate way. The villagers, politely but firmly, make clear that the plan as presented will not work.

This is an extraordinary sequence, in part because Hamaguchi has filmed the meeting with exactly the attention that an actual community meeting deserves. The villagers are not caricatures. The company reps are not villains. They are all people doing jobs under specific constraints.

The Takumi question

What Hamaguchi is doing with Takumi, across the film, is slowly complicating the audience’s initial read of him. The early sequences position him as the film’s moral centre: taciturn, capable, attuned to his environment. As the film progresses, Takumi is revealed to be, in specific ways, less attentive than his initial presentation suggests. His daughter, whose care he is responsible for, goes missing in the final act. The reasons for her going missing involve specific failures of Takumi’s attention.

The film is, in its closing act, raising a specific question about rural-versus-urban moral calculus that American independent cinema almost never raises: is the village’s resistance to the glamping development, in its specific forms, as clean a moral position as the film’s early sequences have positioned it to be? The answer the film offers is complicated.

The final scene

I am not going to describe the final scene. I am going to say only that it is one of the most formally provocative endings of any film in recent memory. The film does something in its final thirty seconds that inverts the viewer’s understanding of what has been building across the preceding two hours.

The reactions at the time of release divided cleanly. Some critics found the ending brilliant. Others found it gratuitous or tacked-on. The divide is, I think, about whether you are willing to accept a film’s specific formal provocation as a legitimate aesthetic move or whether you require a film to conclude its arguments in the register the setup has prepared for.

I am in the first camp. Hamaguchi is a director who has, across his filmography, earned the right to make specific formal moves. The ending of Evil Does Not Exist is one of those moves. It is shocking. It is also, on reflection, specifically consistent with the film’s broader argument about how rural and urban moral economies misread each other.

The Ishibashi score

Eiko Ishibashi, who also scored Drive My Car, has composed for Evil Does Not Exist a specific string-and-piano score that is, by a meaningful margin, the film’s most distinctive sonic element. The score is not scored against the visuals in the conventional sense. It is, at specific intervals, abruptly cut off mid-phrase, and the subsequent silence is the specific emotional register the film is operating in.

The interruptions are disorienting. They are also the film’s method. Evil Does Not Exist is asking the viewer to pay attention to what is happening when the music stops, and what is happening is specifically the opposite of what a conventional score would build toward.

What the film is trying to say

I think Evil Does Not Exist is, on its most generous reading, a film about the impossibility of clean moral calculus in any situation involving communities, ecosystems, and outside economic pressures. The villagers are not innocent. The company is not evil. Takumi is not, finally, the film’s moral centre. The film refuses to provide a protagonist the audience can fully endorse, because the film does not believe the situation it is depicting admits of that kind of endorsement.

This is a difficult film to recommend in the specific way one recommends other films. Evil Does Not Exist is not an uplift. It is not, finally, a conclusion. It is a specific observation about a specific kind of ongoing situation, and it will continue to be an observation whether or not the viewer accepts it.

Watch it alone. Do not read about the ending before you watch it. Accept that the film will not resolve for you in the way you expect it to. Pay attention when the score stops.