Aku wa Sonzai Shinai
Ryusuke Hamaguchi (2023)
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (2021), a major international success, was three hours long and often slow-moving. At its best (during the opening forty-five minutes or so) the film included moments of surprise, to which the calm pace of the storytelling added impact. Hamaguchi’s new film is more than an hour shorter. Like its laurelled predecessor, Evil Does Not Exist is often unhurried and sometimes jolting but in a different way. The camera moves in the course of the opening shot – of lofty overhanging trees, from a low vantage point amidst them – but the essential picture persists for what feels like ages. The tree branches are skinny and mostly leafless; what foliage there is, higher up, seems remote. Despite the trees’ bleak beauty, the overall effect is disconcerting and, because the shot is so prolonged, you’re doubly relieved when Hamaguchi eventually cuts to a different image. (He shares the editing credit with Azusa Yamasaki, credited as sole editor on Drive My Car.) A middle-aged man enters the woodland, starts chopping wood and continues to do so for several minutes. The sequence is even more remarkable than the opening shot: this viewer, for one, would never have believed a demonstration of the art of wood-cutting could make for nearly hypnotic screen action. The man takes his axe to a chunk of wood, cuts it in half, takes one of the halves, bisects that, moves on to one of those halves … This is so absorbing that, when Hamaguchi eventually cuts away, it’s an almost startling interruption. In the early stages of Drive My Car he generates audience reaction by inserting unexpected happenings into an otherwise leisurely narrative. At the start of Evil Does Not Exist he does so just by ending a shot that you’d begun to think was never going to end.
That wood-cutting is not slow cinema for its own sake: the sequence also helps to suggest the rhythm of life in the community where the film is mostly set. Harasawa, a rural village not so far from Tokyo in geographical distance, is culturally a million miles from the metropolis. The axeman is single-parent Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who lives in the village with his young daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa); his odd jobs include, as well as chopping wood, hauling water from the local well. Harasawa’s routines and ecology are on the point of serious disruption, even destruction: a Tokyo company called Playmode is preparing to start construction of a tourist development – a glamping site – in the area. Two representatives of the company, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), are dispatched to Harasawa to conduct a meeting with Takumi and his fellow villagers – to hear their concerns about the proposed septic tank that will pollute the well water, a lack of security staff for the new site, the threat to local wildlife and businesses. The Playmode duo presents this meeting, of course, as an important listening exercise. The Harasawa folk aren’t so unworldly that they don’t write off the dialogue as talking to a brick wall.
After its introduction, the film settles into a somewhat more familiar narrative style but Hamaguchi (as he did with, for example, the Uncle Vanya auditions in Drive My Car) has key scenes play out in what’s made to feel like real time: the Playmode reps’ session with the villagers; the debrief at Tokyo HQ, where Takahashi and Mayuzumi discuss ‘takeaways’ from the session with bosses whose minds are evidently on what they consider more important company business. Evil Does Not Exist has been described by some reviewers as an ‘eco-fable’ and, for a while, it looks to be developing into a humorously satirical piece. Even at the first meeting with residents, Mayuzumi is uncomfortable shooting a fatuously reassuring line. When she and Takahashi are sent back to the village for further negotiations, their conversation on the road journey from Tokyo confirms that neither is a corporate apparatchik: Takahashi is actually a show-business ‘talent agent’ and Mayuzumi a care worker (I didn’t get why or how they came to be Playmode employees). During their second meeting with Takumi, Takahashi insists on having a go chopping wood. His first, hopeless efforts end with the axe firmly planted in the wood; once Takumi shows him how it’s done, Takahashi gets it right and can’t remember when he last felt so exhilarated. He doesn’t often get things right: there’s something silly about his bright orange anorak; when he and Mayuzumi eat with Takumi at the village’s noodle restaurant, Takahashi compliments the chef – ‘That’s really warmed me up’ – and gets an offended, scathing reply. Even so, as he talks about wanting to live in the village (presumably as it currently is), Takahashi seems to be heading in the spiritual direction of Peter Riegert’s Mac in Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983). When the Playmode bosses come up with the idea, as a sop to local concerns, of employing Takumi as security guard on the glamping site, it briefly seems that he may be landed with a moral dilemma in the form of a financial offer he can’t refuse.
Any expectations that the story will be conventionally resolved are confounded. The film’s peculiar rhythm, lulling viewers into a long take or lengthy scene before catapulting us elsewhere, never disappears and potently reasserts itself in the last scenes of Evil Does Not Exist. Deer roam freely in forests and hills around the village. Asked by Mayuzumi if the animals are dangerous, Takumi says not, except for wounded deer that have been ‘gut shot’. Suddenly (or so it seems), young Hana has gone missing and the villagers search for her. Mayuzumi also disappears and Takahashi wonders if she’s decided to return to Tokyo. Mayuzumi then reappears with an unexplained hand wound that Takumi bandages before resuming the search for his daughter, which continues past nightfall. Early next morning, Takumi appears to catch sight of Hana standing in a field with a deer a short distance away. When Takahashi approaches, Takumi tells him to stay back; the instruction is disobeyed and Takumi violently assaults Takahashi. Takumi looks again into the field, where Hana now lies dead, apparently as the result of a deer attack. There’s a tortured groaning on the soundtrack, presumably from the injured Takahashi. The end.
I sat down to watch the film wondering about the source and meaning of its portentous title. I got up still wondering about that and more generally puzzled by the conclusion. The end of Drive My Car was also decidedly cryptic but the effect was different there because the closing scene was an epilogue rather than the dramatic climax. You don’t get far interpreting the finale of Evil Does Not Exist in eco-fabular symbolic terms because the symbols tend to get in each other’s way. (Hana could represent the younger generation who’ll be the victims of continuing to ignore environmental concerns – but what does it then mean for her to be killed by part of the wildlife whose existence is threatened by same?) Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a beguiling film-maker – just how beguiling comes across more strongly in this film than in Drive My Car: the relative brevity gives greater salience to the juxtaposition of slow cinema and sudden, disorienting changes of perspective. I don’t know, though, what this amounts to. Reading about Evil Does Not Exist afterwards, I learn that ‘Hamaguchi has said the title entered his mind while visiting the film’s locations’ (Sight and Sound, March 2024), which feels a bit of a letdown; also that the piece was first planned ‘as a 30-minute short film accompanied by a live score composed by Eiko Ishibashi’ (Wikipedia). Ishibashi’s music is certainly a strong presence and this feature-length collaboration between her and Hamaguchi stays in the mind. Yet I can’t help feeling it shows the stretch marks of expansion from its original conception.
7 March 2024
