Evil Does Not Exist Movie Review | London Film Festival 2023

Evil Does Not Exist is an uncertain slow-burn examination on the exact question its title proposes, but one that fails to be an impactful study of any depth.

In 2021, the world came to know the name of Ryusuke Hamaguchi after Drive My Car received nominations all through awards season, became lauded amongst audiences & professionals alike and even garnered Best International Feature Film win at the Oscars. It’s not every day that a film, despite its actual quality, captures the eyes of the general public when it’s a slow burn drama about a man coping with the loss of his wife for three hours, but Hamaguchi’s artistic expression clear spoke universally, it’s only natural from there that his next feature Evil Does Not Exist would make a festival run with high interest, travelling to the Venice Film Festival and eventually the London Film Festival.

Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, a rural town near the mountains outside of Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. One day, the village inhabitants are approached by a company intending to build a glamping site in the heart of their peaceful remote village to city residents a comfortable “escape” to nature.

When two company representatives from Tokyo arrive in the village to hold a meeting, it becomes clear that the project will have a negative impact on the local water supply, on the local wildlife and the quite day-to-day life of the villagers, causing unrest. The agency’s mismatched intentions endanger both the ecological balance of the plateau and their way of life, with an aftermath that affects Takumi’s life deeply.

Evil Does Not Exist‘s central ideas as clear: an exploration of humanity’s relationship with natura, the corrosiveness of corporate greed, and the delicate balance we all must aim for to live in peace with those around us. To manifest these themes, Hamaguchi takes a serene approach, despite the runtime of “Drive My Car” being cut in half he’s a storyteller who takes his time and just allows the setting of his story to become a character onto itself: the mountains, the snow, the cold, the silence amongst the trees, the near carefree of day-to-day for Takumi and his fellow villagers. Everything is a routine: Takumi’s wood chopping, his trek down the riverbend to get water for the restaurant, the meal he gets in exchange for this work, his picking up of Hana from school, his lateness, Hana’s lone walk home and Takumi’s eventual search for his daughter deep into the woods.

No tension, no real drama, just a checklist that everyone in this village is all too accustomed to. It’s a patience-testing approach for a story, but one that displays Hamaguchi’s commanding helm on the film, eventually it’s almost as if we’re part of this routine, one of the villagers.

Unsure if we need to see Takumi’s forgetfulness on display three times followed by long tracking shots of him leaving school after finding his daughter decided to walk home, or him walking up and down to the river and back to his car with heavy water jugs three or four times without any real drama, but it’s Hamaguchi’s way of settling us in only to eventually plant the seeds of distrust and tension; creating an immersive environment where we seek shelter from the palpable cold coming from the silent snow-filled forest only to witness a dramatic brew stewing over a hot, tense fire.

Any movie with such notably effective technical prowess deserves no less than the recognition for the craft where Hamaguchi slow-burn sensibilities are on raw display, making the sounds of nature perhaps the most notable protagonist in this story and the exquisite cinematography of Yoshio Kitagawa a perfect complement for it. These are easily the Hamaguchi’s most powerful tools in his storytelling approach to capture our attention, but they also reveal how little there is to the actual story and its characters, whose lack of any proper depth forbid us to develop any level of emotional connection with them.

Due to this, Hamaguchi’s does make a less than two hours pass with a fittingly glacial pace, offering his story little to no momentum despite its stunning atmosphere. Every scene while lacking any deeper narrative complexity is working double duty on the audio-visual spectrum, where the villagers are just as much a part of the environment as the trees, the snow, the mountains, the deer. This excruciatingly testing approach can’t be deemed necessary from a narrative standpoint, but it is the kind of approach that shows Hamaguchi’s uninterrupted artistic voice in its purest form.

But it is also an approach that lacks balance as Evil Does Not Exist quickly descends into a repetitive and uneventful cycle of mundane activities with no sense of escalation or narrative connections, despite representing his central ideas and the thematic nature of the film, they are all eventually made redundant and blur together making the experience not engaging but rather tedious.

Even without having personally experienced Drive My Car to this day, Evil Does Not Exist as this writer’s first exposure to Hamaguchi seems to actively test its own accessibility from a general audience point of view, essentially the crowd that embraced these same stylistic & narrative sensibilities two years prior, but I’m willing to bet despite their common elements such as the slow burn story and the technical proficiency, Hamaguchi’s previous effort did not strike his audience as so empty and hollow.

Fittingly, the performances are intentionally stoic, and with so many ideas where Hamaguchi trusts the audience to fill in the blanks, most of the characters we follow are left underwritten creating the parallels with the themes of the story feeling underexplored, which is all the more confusing given it offers no real sense of closure. Pilling up on the strange creative decision made, it’s the two antagonistic talent agents Hamaguchi offers glimpses of arcs to while the villagers remain stationary in their growth.

To an extent, this aims to be the point as their fight is to keep things the way they are, but this does not make for the most rewarding experience. Late into the story, “Evil Does Not Exist” showcases a shockingly abrupt turn of events where escalation seems to finally take place but the surprise is all there is to it, no real commentary or corelation to what we witness prior to these sudden events in the final 15 minutes of the film.

It remains uncertain if Evil Does Not Exist… but the film certainly does, as an uncertain slow-burn examination on the exact question its title proposes but one that fails to be an impactful study of any depth to its central themes. Exposing Hamaguchi’s overconfidence in how much he shows that offers any actual value to the story.

FINAL GRADE: C-

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About Evil Does Not Exist

Takumi and his daughter Hana live in Mizubiki Village, close to Tokyo. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. One day, the village inhabitants become aware of a plan to build a glamping site near Takumi’s house; offering city residents a comfortable ‘escape’ to nature.

When two company representatives from Tokyo arrive in the village to hold a meeting, it becomes clear that the project will have a negative impact on the local water supply, causing unrest. The agency’s mismatched intentions endanger both the ecological balance of the nature plateau and their way of life, with an aftermath that affects Takumi’s life deeply.

Evil Does Not Exist played at the 2023 London Film Festival.