Evil Does Not Exist

悪は存在しない
Aku wa Sonzai Shinai

dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2024

This film’s title is awfully similar to another film from a few years ago, being There is No Evil, by Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof, but they are making very different points.

The earlier film is about how terrible the theocratic regime in Iran is and has been for the last forty years, tormenting, executing and terrorising its own citizens for having the temerity to exist and breathe. This Japanese film makes the point that no evil exists, in the natural world. Until maybe it spontaneously pops into existence for brief moments in time.

Mohammad Rasoulof has now fled from Iran, and probably won’t be returning any time soon, since, for his crime of accurately representing the barbarity of his home country’s ruling totalitarian regime, he has been convicted of crimes against the state. Ryusuke Hamaguchi probably isn’t facing any such punishment from the Japanese government, mostly because, for all their faults, they don’t execute or convict people for making movies, or for being artists, or for being women.

That being said, I can imagine that there might be a fair few people who would wish this director bodily harm over the way the film ends…

If you’re familiar with Hamaguchi’s work, or his celebrated 3 hour low-key epic Oscar winning flick Drive My Car, you know his films spool out at a leisurely rate. He is in no rush to do anything, ever. He’s happy to plonk a camera down in a spot and have it record acres and acres of footage of stuff happening or not happening, until the batteries run out. Perhaps like in the gargantuan films of Andrei Tarkovsky himself, Hamagushi uses the opening hour or so of a flick to weed out the impatient and the hyperactive from the audience.

Thankfully, this flick is only an hour and 40 or so minutes long, and it practically flies by. In comparison. Only in comparison.

The first ten minutes of this flick is footage of a camera being pulled slowly through a forest, as the camera records the overcast sky through the treetops. A lush orchestral piece plays as an accompaniment, but whatever warmth or comfort it might have provided, the music becomes strident, and almost threatening, before cutting off abruptly. The next twenty minutes or so is spent recording a man chopping wood and filling containers with spring water, chat with a guy about wild wasabi, and then rush to his young daughter when he realises he’s forgotten to pick her up from day care.

That taciturn chap, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), seems like a main character. There is no main character in the same way that there is no evil, apparently, in the world. There are characters, some of whom live in a mountain community, and two who don’t, being two shmucks sent by a corporation to placate the yokels with some community engagement, and yet not all characters are created equally.

You will, if you watch this film, hear the word “glamping” repeated, in English, by native Japanese speakers, more times than you have ever heard the word in your life.

The two people who represent the corporation, aren’t even a part of the corporation. They’re actors, who are out of work, who signed on with a PR firm, to give presentations they don’t understand about places they know nothing about with a manner that brings comfort and assurance that everything will be okay and there will be prosperity for all.

The locals don’t buy any of that, and when there’s a community engagement forum, the locals push back on every aspect of the plan as either being completely unfeasible or potentially very damaging, with very obvious consequences. They do it calmly, though, knowing that these two smiling suits, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), know nothing and are powerless figureheads anyway.

Behind their empty corporate speak there’s nothing, and both sides know it. As well as pushing back on the dumber elements of the plan, Takumi remains calm, and also keeps other townsfolk, who are a bit more heated, in line. He sees the dumbness of the proposal, but he also knows it’s inevitable, no matter how unfeasible.

When their corporate master, a man who knows nothing about glamping, camping, planning, the environment or anything, for that matter, tells the PR hacks to employ Takumi as a caretaker as a sop to the locals but also because they think he’ll keep the rest in line, they obediently set off to travel back to the mountain village in order to make it all happen.

We’re told multiple times that the only reason they’re doing this glamping resort thing is because they want to get as much of those sweet, sweet government covid subsidies as they can, and that the actual running of the camp, or the impact, is immaterial.

It would be easy to hate on these chumps, but they know they’re chumps, and they hate their jobs. There is an extraordinarily long sequence where the two of them are just driving towards the village, which only seems to be a couple of hours away from Tokyo. They speak about their dissatisfaction with their jobs, with dating, with life, and in fact they are the characters that we hear the most about compared to anyone else in the flick.

Does that make them the main characters? There is no shortage of films where people from the city visit people in the country and are wowed by the ‘simple’ life, and their practical ways. Takahashi, upon watching Takumi chop wood (for an age) asks if he could chop some wood, and fucks it up until Takumi gives him some terse pointers, and then he’s cheering, from one successful swipe, like he’s won a tournament or something. Takahashi, who we heard was dissatisfied with his life during the car trip, has gone “native” so quickly it is, I think, deliberately comical. Mayuzumi generally stands around looking apologetic, but even she is like “the fuck is up with you?” when he starts exhorting that, based on that woodchop swing, he wants to move to this town and live here for the rest of his life, and be the caretaker himself, when Takumi turns it down.

This is not that kind of film. He thought he was the main character. He is not.

It’s not that the town is closed off or hostile to outsiders, but a guy in a puffer jacket deciding he’s going to simplify his life and insert himself into this place with no skills and no connection to the place, well, it’s enough to make you want to strangle the guy.

There’s an element that I haven’t elaborated upon, and that is the way that the flick manifests its (possible) argument about the natural world, and balance, and the abilities of the townsfolk to achieve that, is that it’s not coming from a positive place. There’s a lingering sadness that hangs over the film, because I think ultimately it’s saying that balance isn’t really possible. Nature does what it does, and we keep finding ways to fuck it up.

Even an innocent like Takumi’s daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) who wanders around in nature like she’s a Disney princess, she is oblivious to the dangers, whether they’re obvious or not. There’s a sense of foreboding that hangs over the film with each of these scenes when she’s wandering around on her own. If you were ever a parent, you know.

If you weren’t, I envy you (some days). There is no evil in nature, because there’s no intention, no malice, but that doesn’t mean bad things can’t happen.

The contradiction is emphasised when Takumi is telling the two PR flacks about how where they’re planning on putting the glamping site is smack bang in the middle of a busy deer trail. He tells them the deer avoid humans at all costs, and people shouldn’t mess with them anyway, because they’re riddled with disease. But then he says there’s nothing to worry about, because deer will assiduously avoid people.

Unless.

Unless a young one has been shot and wounded, and the mother is near by.

Gee, I wonder if that’s going to factor into anything?

Hana goes missing, the whole community comes out to search for her, but I’m telling you, since, gods, no spoilers, the way the story goes you’d never predict in a million years.

I don’t get the ending. I’ve read interviews with the director explaining what he wanted people to get out of the ending, and I still don’t understand the ending. It’s baffling to me.

I can’t say that I think it’s a bad ending, and I think we’ve been primed for it, by, of all things, the curious way in which the flick has these abrupt cuts, usually to do with the soundtrack, but it’s so abrupt that it’s shocking.

It’s almost like the director was telling us something in advance. I think, to be honest, and to be a little unfair to the director, he wanted to be deliberately obscure, because hey, directors don’t always know how to end a story.

Maybe evil doesn’t exist in this world permanently. There is no devil or dark god bringing misery into the world, into existence – there are plenty of humans too willing to bring evil forth again and again. But maybe it’s not a permanent fixture, fixed in reality like an eternal wound. Maybe the fact that it’s so brief, so temporary, is our only consolation.

Again to be uncharitable I think this flick would have been completely unremarkable without that ending, and yet the ending itself is not special.

Baffling. The point of some films is baffling, until you remind yourself that a lot of baffling movies came out of the pandemic.

And this is another one of them.

7 times the deer have been plotting revenge ever since Bambi out of 10

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“I bet (the entertainment industry) isn’t what you expected.”
- “No, it’s full of scumbags, just exactly as I expected.” – it’s a great industry, no question – Evil Does Not Exist

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi2564474649/?playlistId=tt28490044&ref_=tt_p...