[FIRST IMPRESSIONS] “Enigmatic Pronouncement: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s 𝐸𝑣𝑖𝑙 𝐷𝑜𝑒𝑠 𝑁𝑜𝑡 𝐸𝑥𝑖𝑠𝑡” by Oliver Farry

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Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (director), Evil Does Not Exist, 2023. 106 min.

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s follow-up to his Oscar-nominated hit Drive My Car starts off as a seemingly much more conventional film, in the vein of the David v Goliath ecological genre, familiar from Hollywood films such as Mike Nichols’s Silkwood, Stephen Soderbergh’s Erin Brockovich or Gus Van Sant’s Promised Land. Widower Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) lives with his young daughter Hana in a peaceful mountain village a couple of hours’ drive west of Tokyo. The taciturn but good-natured Takumi is a self-professed jack-of-all-trades for the village, boundlessly resourceful and possessed of the sort of encyclopaedic knowledge of nature that belongs to an earlier age.

^{Widower Takumi lives with his young daughter Hana in a peaceful mountain village}

The peace of the village is disturbed, as is often the case in such films, by outsiders with big plans. In this case, it is developers from the capital who have bought land nearby with the intention of building a glamping facility, to attract other city slickers to unwind on weekend breaks. An information meeting with the locals proves to be not the formality the developers expected, with the wily locals being far more knowledgeable than the poorly briefed PR hacks Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) sent to front the operation. The villagers tell them the provisions for septic tanks are not sufficient to prevent the pristine local groundwater from being polluted, and they say the lack of a night-time security guard will leave the village at risk of forest fires started by feckless partying weekenders.

Takahashi and Mayuzumi return to Tokyo, relaying the villagers’ concerns to the developers in a genuinely sympathetic way. But the bosses are unmoved: there’s no budget for more changes (and one of them says “the drinking water there will still be less polluted than in the city”) and construction needs to start without delay so they can benefit from pandemic subsidies whose deadline is arriving. They suggest Takahashi and Mayuzumi drive back to the village to talk to Takumi, now identified as the village’s ecological kingpin, and win him over.

From here on out, the film veers off to become a much different one, even if it is still not necessarily radical in either a formal or thematic sense. To explain more would be to give away too much of the plot, but suffice to say that Hamaguchi takes time in the film’s middle act to reorient the film’s focus to Takahashi and Mayuzumi in their drive back down the country, as they acquaint themselves with one another, each confiding their own dissatisfaction with metropolitan life. By the time they get to the village and meet Takumi for lunch, we know they are in search for something a lot more spiritually fulfilling than the village’s agreement for the glamping site.

The title Evil Does Not Exist presages a dark, flinty work, one that is bound to bely that very statement. But we can take the words at face value—even as conflict and contradictions, both interpersonal and introspective, surface in the narrative, Hamaguchi holds to the title’s enigmatic pronouncement in a literal way. It might be an ecologically inflected version of Jean Renoir’s old saw, “every villain has his reasons”: Takahashi and Mayuzumi, a sad-sack corporate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are, their mission notwithstanding, shown to be fundamentally decent people in the wrong job. And nature, which is the overarching dominion in this film—and the sole thing that Takumi fears, even as he loves it—is something that can be a terrifying force, capable of killing you in a thousand different ways, without any malignancy, without it being anything personal. In the wild, evil does not exist, but that doesn’t mean bad things can’t happen.

How to cite: Farry, Oliver. “Enigmatic Pronouncement: Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/29/evil.