Films can present so many labyrinth ideas where you’re really not sure if you’re watching one type of film or another. I certainly feel that way about director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s cinema. He creates narratives that both brilliantly confound the audience while keeping them on their toes. He definitely did it with last year’s Evil Does Not Exist, an unpredictable and highly fascinating hybrid of nature and message movie.
Buy Evil Does Not Exist Blu-rayWidowed father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter Hana inhabit an isolated but peaceful snowy mountain village near Tokyo, along with other villagers living simple existences. However, everyone’s lives are disrupted when a pair of corporate reps arrive to build a glamping site in the area that promises to bring business and tourism, something that the villagers can do without. They believe that the project will create chaos and have harmful impacts on their environment. However, the reps themselves begin to sense that the project is bogus, so they offer Takumi, a respected figure in the village, a job as the site caretaker.
He teaches them about nature, the simplicity of it, and why the area is so important to everyone. All seems well, but after a mysterious event involving Hana’s sudden disappearance takes place, it becomes unclear if Takumi is everything he appears to be, or is there something much darker underneath?
As I mentioned above, the unpredictability of the film comes from the fact it seems like a straightforward eco-parable about villagers at odds with greedy developers who just want to make money from their misery. But in Hamaguchi’s hands it becomes anything but straightforward. The long shots, the many moments of silence, the conversations between characters, and especially the haunting music of singer-songwriter and musician Eiko Ishibashi, lead to a film that’s both eerie and important, meaning that its abstraction and elusiveness don’t shy it too far from its overall story of nature’s disembowelment by humanity.
A film that couldn’t have come at a more crucial time, Evil Does Not Exist (ironic title by the way) is a bold film that suggests that just because you can’t see evil doesn’t mean it isn’t there. It’s a terrific film from one of today’s most visionary filmmakers.
Special features include a new interview with Hamaguchi, and trailer. There’s also an essay by writer Michael Joshua Rowin.
