Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist is many things — a fable about man’s relationship with nature, a drama about a small village’s fight against corporate pollution, a poem about the beauty and destruction brought on by the natural world. Ultimately, though, it eludes classification, refusing to commit to being one thing and instead asking us to question our relationship with the world around us.
Evil Does Not Exist follows widower Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a resident of a small village outside Tokyo. He lives with daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), who he often forgets to pick up from school. Takumi is an oddball and the local village handyman, respected but left to his own devices. One day, the village is visited by people who have purchased land in the area to develop a glamping site for tourists. What these developers don’t realize is just how delicate the village’s ecosystem is and how their presence already serves as a disrupting force long before construction even begins.
Evil Does Not Exist begins and ends with an extended shot of treetops, filmed from below as if someone is looking up as they wander through the forest. Eiko Ishibashi’s score is mournful, but we don’t quite know why yet. The peaceful village of Mizubiki seems to be in a state of transition at the tail end of winter. Snow is still on the ground, but it is slowly melting. Golden grass peaks through the frost, the ice on the lake is making way for a reflection of the sky above.
Bookended by these two sequences, the moments in between vacillate between slice-of-life vignettes — a town hall meeting, a dinner between friends, a walk between father and daughter — and something more ominous. Mysterious gunshots ring out, presumably hunters in some neighboring village. Ishibashi’s score will skip to sudden silence as Hamaguchi cuts to another image. It’s all meant to feel slightly off, as if we aren’t supposed to find our balance within this seemingly idyllic world.
That’s likely because this balance will soon be interrupted. We meet Takumi, who spends his time collecting water from a spring for the local udon restaurant, chopping firewood for his wood-burning stove, and hosting fellow villagers at his remote home. From the beginning, though, something seems off with Takumi — his near silent demeanor belies a gruffness that stands in contrast to the warmth of his fellow villagers.
That gruffness allows him to live a relatively peaceful life until it’s interrupted by Takahashi and Mayuzumi, two representatives of the company who want to install the glamping site. Though they are swayed by the villagers’ pleas to take care of the land they hope to occupy, their corporate bosses are not. With good intentions, they return to Mizubiki in the hopes of meeting the villagers halfway, but their very presence is a reminder of the way the industrial world is encroaching on the natural beauty of the village.
Takahashi eagerly insists Takumi teach him how to chop wood. Mayuzumi helps Takumi collect the water for the udon restaurant. These efforts, though, only lead to imbalance. As Evil Does Not Exist goes on, Hamaguchi’s direction becomes more and more disconcerting. The balance of nature is thrown off. Time moves differently, cuts become more severe. When Hana goes missing, an ominous dusk settles over the village, making the surrounding woods seem otherworldly.
The end of Evil Does Not Exist takes things in a wholly surprising direction, one that left my theater completely silent as the credits rolled. It may seem out of left field and in some ways it is, but upon closer inspection, it falls in line with everything Hamaguchi has been showing us up to that point. If, as the title posits, evil does not exist, then what do we make of such violence popping the bucolic bubble that has been presented to us?
Violence can be instinctual, something that lives dormant within us until it is forced to come to the surface by extreme circumstances. In that sense, despite its serenity, violence looms over Evil Does Not Exist until the very end. The gun shots echoing through the snow-capped mountains. Blood dripping from a thorn bush in a tranquil forest. A corporation invading a small village for profit. The roar of a chainsaw in the front yard. It’s all there, waiting to rear its ugly head.
That’s hardly Hamaguchi’s main concern, but it is one that he ends on. The final shot of the film is of the treetops again. This time, though, labored breathing can be heard as boots crunch over the snow. It’s unclear whose perspective we’re seeing, but it doesn’t matter — what we see at the beginning and at the end, of life, of this movie, of a shorter journey — is all that ends up mattering.