- Evil Does Not Exist
- Written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
- Starring Hitoshi Omika, Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani
- Classification N/A; 106 minutes
- Opens in select theatres May 10
Critic’s Pick
As haunting as the 2022 hit Drive My Car was soothing, Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film Evil Does Not Exist arrives in a starved-for-quality spring movie season as that rarest of artifacts. This is an instant-masterpiece worthy of intense debate in which every side will have a valid point. Split into two halves – clock-watcher audiences need not fear; this film is about half the runtime of Drive My Car – Evil Does Not Exist explores the complicated state and perhaps doomed future of a tiny alpine town outside of Tokyo called Mizubiki, and what happens when the cold, hard agents of commerce clash with the equally unforgiving forces of nature.
On one side of the story is the single father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who when not caring for his grade-school daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) runs the local udon restaurant. A no-nonsense man of the land, Takumi takes severe pride in locally sourcing his kitchen’s ingredients, spending hours each day gathering water from the stream and foraging for wild wasabi in the woods. His life is quiet, single-minded and at tremendous odds with the plans of a Tokyo development company that wants to build a luxury-camping site smack in the middle of Mizubiki. This naturally threatens the town’s water supply, among other things.
On one side of the Evil Does Not Exist story is the single father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who when not caring for his grade-school daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) runs the local udon restaurant.Supplied
In an ill-considered bid to win over the locals, the developers hire two public-relations flaks, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), to make nice and forge ahead. But facing a fierce opposition led by Takumi, Takahashi and Mayuzumi are forced to consider not only their professional goals, but how they got to such a place where people’s lives are things to be massaged and workshopped, rather than accepted and embraced.
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Patient and meticulous in its pacing, Hamaguchi’s film keeps an extraordinarily careful check of its narrative calculations and thematic ambitions. There is a reason why the director chooses a marathon town-council session – a quietly furious airing of grievances that is so naturally chaotic it feels pulled from a documentary – as the point in his story to switch perspectives from Takumi to his two PR foes. A film that starts off as a dignified whisper turns into a stifled scream, even if it is in fact a darkly funny yelp as the world expands to explore the inner lives of Takahashi and Mayuzumi, which in turn recasts Takumi’s pride as something perhaps not so admirable.
Takumi attends a marathon town-council session.Supplied
And then there is the film’s eye-popping, brow-furrowing ending, in which everyone’s dreams – Takumi’s desire to keep things as they are, and Takahashi and Mayuzumi’s cynical bid to usher in inevitable change – turn into a shared nightmare as unnerving as it is confounding.
After having watched the film twice and spending many more hours combing through various Reddit pages and Twitter threads dedicated to deciphering Hamaguchi’s game, I’m confident calling the finale here both a skeleton key and a lockbox.
Received one way, the film’s last scene lands like a nonsensical sucker-punch, unexpectedly cruel. But cock your head a degree or two in the other direction, and the final few minutes deliver a terrifying, swift punchline to an epic, magnificently dark joke that Hamaguchi had been telling right from the opening. However you choose to interpret it, Evil Does Not Exist lingers, magnificently and furiously.
Barry Hertz