Evil Does Not Exist offers no answers for its terrifying questions
polygon.comI spent a lot of time contemplating the title of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film Evil Does Not Exist. It still echoes in my brain, as I watch and rewatch the film. It’s a puzzle to turn over, a bitter lozenge lodged in my cheek. It’s almost farcical, how banal the movie’s premise is: a talent agency wants to set up a glamping site in a remote Japanese village, and sends two hapless PR reps to sell the community on the plan. Most of us don’t contemplate the nature of evil when considering glamping, you know? But maybe we should.
At its most obvious, Evil Does Not Exist is an environmentalist fable. Hamaguchi, who previously directed Drive My Car, moves at a languid pace, and the sparseness of his script means that, on a plot level, few things happen in this movie. The film is built around a 20-minute town-hall meeting. Otherwise, it mostly follows Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a widower raising a young daughter, Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) and earning a living doing odd jobs in his mountain village. He collects water from a spring for a local restaurant, splits firewood, and does whatever else needs doing. Hamaguchi is happy to have the camera follow Takumi at a comfortable distance as he goes about his day.
Through Takumi’s eyes, the audience gets a clear point of view on the community reaction to the agency’s plans for a glamping development, as the locals articulate their relationship with the environment and how the project would destroy that. It’s quite clear, though, that the agency’s interest in community input is solely for optics. No one actually cares what the villagers think.
And the agency’s owner — who can’t be bothered to show up to the town hall himself — doesn’t even seem that invested in the glamping endeavor. The company’s stated goal isn’t in branching out into recreational services, but in obtaining pandemic subsidies from the government to boost its bottom line. You could call that evil.
Hamaguchi began work on Evil Does Not Exist with the intention of
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