‘Evil Does Not Exist’ – 24th Annual San Diego Asian Film Festival Recap

Following the success of his 2021 film “Drive My Car,” Academy Award-winning director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, in his latest feature, is not concerned with showing you that evil does exist, but rather incentivizing you to think that it can.

From the moment the film opens, with a worm’s-eye-view dolly capturing the tops of snowy trees and the endless bright blue sky, there is a permeating sense of innocence — suggested via a young girl’s perspective as she walks through these woods — paralleled with nature. This level of purity is, for the most part, preserved for the duration of the movie, in the sense that nothing is ever fully exposed to the point where the viewer can become desensitized to all the answers.

The director recently stated in an interview at the New York Film Festival, that people often assume what is only naturally occurring must not possess evil like a tsunami or an earthquake. Perhaps then what is truly evil, even more so than the violence of natural disasters, is whatever our minds predict to come based on our accumulated observations of human intent throughout each other’s individual lives. The title, “Evil Does Not Exist,” therefore plays a role in describing the content of the movie, but it isn’t exactly a statement limiting the imagination of its viewers to look further into the plausibility of evil in a grander world than just what the film shows, like a tie-in with the bigger real one we’ve all experienced firsthand. 

Hamaguchi has rightfully approached this by ensuring the film remains impartial and refrains from taking a definitive stance. It doesn’t neglect the plausibility of danger towards any of the characters, nor does it neglect the plausibility of good in all of the characters, even the people from the “glamping” (a portmanteau of ‘glamorous camping’) company, the antagonists who want to build a resort in the mountains of a nanoscopic village at what they claim to be the small cost of polluting the village’s sole water source. There is equally just as much hostility that can be speculated in the very place being invaded by these disruptors.

For example, the ambiguous and cold townsfolk Takumi, performed with memorable oddity by Hitoshi Omika, seems just as open to positive and negative interpretations as the movie gives for the outside practitioners against nature itself. He is constantly seen chopping wood, and one can only see a striking ax for so long, or the sound of firearms blasting from fellow villagers in the distance, without wondering whether it’s to foreshadow something much more sinister happening behind the scenes that we have yet to decipher. Notions, such as his love for his daughter, seem to lessen the possibility of evil intentions towards these ‘enemy invaders’ so to speak, or at least something less than evil since he has a universally relatable motive.

The two lead glamping employees, Mayazumi and Takahashi (Ayaka Shibutani and Ryûji Kosakaon), the other hand, have an abundance of screen time to the point where the audience can easily sympathize with their respectable aspirations for a satisfactory life, and their desire to make things as right as they possibly can with the villagers to the point of jeopardizing their own jobs. This helps counterweigh the cruel reality of them being hired corporate schemers. While sharp tools have the potential to lead to evil, so does urbanization. From what’s being shown here though, evil evidently doesn’t quite exist, yet, we can still anticipate the proceeding steps for it to ultimately manifest as experienced human beings instinctively do.  

In classic Hamaguchi fashion, there are not a lot of scenes that make up its runtime as opposed to the usual feature length. Many of them go on for around ten minutes, which may seem excessive on paper, but completely humanize the subject matter in retrospect. This stylistic decision makes the environment and characters appear all the more real, however, like any film, it feels like only some of this ‘genuineness’ is superfluously cherry-picked given that there are so many moments that make up a life. Surely, what will catch most viewers off guard is the film’s ending, which won’t be spoiled here but, once you see it, you’ll know why.

Nonetheless, this all makes “Evil Does Not Exist” further evidence that Hamaguchi is steadily becoming a master at making his audience reconsider what they once knew in their own lives – which may now seem too calm to be true – via his relatable yet manufactured stories about characters realizing that there is always more to everything. He also reminds us once more that the death of innocence is often the draw of fictional movies and stories in general, usually at first mysterious yet eventually debunked. How? By choosing this time, despite these norms, to not completely kill it, but rather disrupt it a bit, especially during its unforgettable climax.