VIFF 2023 | Movie Review: "Evil Does Not Exist" a Sublime Time Spent Lost in the Woods

11/12 ForReel Score | 4.5/5 Stars

Sometimes, it takes the right film coming along at the right time to get you writing again. For me, that film was Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, screened on a quiet, unassuming Tuesday evening at the 42nd Vancouver International Film Festival.

This is a work that reminded me of what films—even the quiet and unassuming ones—can do, how they can soothe you but also deceive you, how they can upend expectations and also ground you in earthy familiarities. At points, the film had me battling heavy eyelids, but at others, it had me leaned as far forward in my seat as I could manage—I literally felt the “pull” of a narrative taking me deeper.

Image courtesy of VIFF

Without going too deep now, Evil Does Not Exist can be described as an ecological drama about a proposed urbanization project (a glamping resort) in a small, rural community outside of Japan, as reckoned with by a sampling of the village’s inhabitants and the project’s proponents. These are the grounds for what might strike one as a clear-cut conflict, but Hamaguchi’s approach to his story and its themes is too hushed and mystery-laden to offer definitive answers. Similarly, the film deals with the kind of modern, push-button subject matter that often provokes strong and emotional responses, but Hamaguchi goes a decidedly un-commercial route, and at an unhurried pace that obfuscates expected emotional beats.

If the name Hamaguchi recalls for you his previous international showstopper, Drive My Car (a VIFF 2021 feature selection), then my use of the word “unhurried” may have you already keyed-in. Yes, Evil Does Not Exist too is very languidly paced. For stretches of the film, you are watching characters go about monotonous routines—like wood chopping (lots of wood chopping)—in slow, methodical fashion. This can make for a more trying time at the movies, especially if you are unfamiliar with Hamaguchi, but if the placidity of the filmmaking inspires in you any sort of zen-like patience, then it will also disarm and entrance you in profoundly stirring ways. Plus, this approach should be seen as doing best service to the isolated characters and the bucolic setting - elements that are suitably subdued in their respective states of peace, intrinsic of each other in their natural, but delicate, balance - which itself befits a calm concord.

Working in concord with his collaborators—whether it is cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa capturing serene images of birds, trees, and streams, or composer Eiko Ishibashi returning after Drive My Car to provide rueful strings and curious electronics—Hamaguchi achieves a tantalizing tranquility. (If you can’t get engaged, then this is at the very least a film to chill and smoke to, or chill and slurp noodles with.) His actors’ performances are dialled-back, but they are also understated, and they fit the tone of naturalism that pervades, while his editing—a joint effort with Azusa Yamazaki—will refuse the cut more often than it will indulge, allowing you to stew deliciously in the film’s most innocuous-seeming moments. 

Image courtesy of VIFF

Of course, you might also say there is a lot of “padding” in Evil Does Not Exist—a lot of “nothing” spacing out the significant—but this is precisely what Hamaguchi weaponizes to such brilliant degree, because it is in the negative space that you begin to take the filmic elements for granted, and the film works its subtlest tricks. While Evil Does Not Exist is certainly a work informed by a reverence for the natural world, for example, it is also a work doing a lot to demonstrate how this world is being taken for granted, both in its surface construction and in its subtext. It could be called a “deconstruction” of the environmental drama, maybe, or a slow tale of naturalism disguising itself as a dark fable. In the end, I fear (but also relish) that it may defy classification entirely.

And this is why Evil Does Not Exist is the right film to get you writing again, because it is a nature walk of a film that sneaks up on you in wholly unexpected ways - the kind of film that changes shape just when you think you have it pinned. This makes it a wonderful work to puzzle over, to revisit and recalibrate in your mind. Evil Does Not Exist is a film that will persist.