Evil Does Not Exist

Part of my coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival.

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST   ***

Ryusuke Hamaguchi

2023

IDEA:  A rural village in Japan is thrown out of order when a company arrives with plans to build a tourist site there.

BLURB:  It starts calmly, almost eerily calmly, with the camera gliding through a wintry forest, peering up at bare tree branches passing overhead. A curious young girl enters the scene, then a man methodically chopping wood and bottling water from a stream. For some time, we continue to be lulled into the languid rhythms of this bucolic milieu, sensitized to its scenery and the rituals of its inhabitants through long tracking shots that allow us to fully sink into the images. Through this hushed, laconic style, Hamaguchi engenders the kind of placid atmosphere that feels as though it could be shattered at any moment by the first sign of disruption. So when spokespeople arrive in the small village to promote a “glamping” site their client plans to construct there, it seems fairly obvious who the disruptors will be, and what kind of harm they’ll be bringing to the environment and its people. But Hamaguchi is not so schematic; he wants to challenge our biases and sympathies. After a protracted town hall sequence that more-or-less paints a dichotomy between noble villagers and uncaring corporate stooges, Evil Does Not Exist shifts its point-of-view and slyly destabilizes the hierarchy, its target eventually growing as nebulous as the mist that descends upon the woods in the film’s single, shocking act of violence. Is Hamaguchi’s title ironic, and evil is in fact everywhere? Being the humanist that he is, it’s more likely that he’s sincere, and that for him the world is less filled with evil than it is with opportunistic economic systems that subsume us all. In the quasi-magical realist denouement of Evil Does Not Exist, nature may fight back, but the damage has been done.