Evil Does Not Exist Excuses Treachery

The message of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist is right there in the title, so it’s funny to see reviewers genuflect, pretending that the movie is “enigmatic.” Film Forum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center are presenting this follow-up to Hamaguchi’s extravagantly praised 2021 epic Drive My Car with prestige befitting a filmmaker of international renown. That means that when Hamaguchi addresses “evil,” he is holding forth on a global concern.

When a leisure-time corporate developer attempts to turn Haragawa, a rural area on the outskirts of Tokyo, into a resort for “glamping” (glamorous camping), the townsfolk become suspicious, fearing an ecological intrusion. Hamaguchi portrays the tension between the townies, especially outdoorsman Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his grade-school daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), and the visiting urban sharpies. The latter are two Playmode Talent Agency reps — soyboy Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and feminist Mayazumi (Ayaka Shibutani) — both unexperienced but hired to sway the natives and win their acceptance.

Upstaging the post-atomic-bomb Godzilla allegories, Hamaguchi soft-sells the moral conflict of this situation in favor of promoting an ecological crisis. But this is not what Hamaguchi is good at. His anthology film Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy collated three absorbing stories of individuals going through personal, sexual conflicts. In a similar, less successful vein, his overrated Drive My Car contrived an obvious update of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He repeats that tactic in Evil’s emulation of Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, using its ecology theme to highlight our contemporary social issues.

The film’s title doesn’t sit right for a Chekhov-Ibsen clone. Besides, Hamaguchi is not an ironist. So what is he up to here? Rather than address the current predicament in which politicians and tech giants inflict tyranny upon the worldwide public (the movie makes several pandemic references),  Hamaguchi avoids Japanese Shinto or Buddhist judgment and, instead, resorts to evasive, amoral, secular art-movie tropes: His opening features long takes of trees against a blue sky, bookended by the moon seen through trees at night. (Disregard animism; topicality is Hamaguchi’s default mode.)

Unspoiled peasant Takumi displays Lincolnesque skill at woodchopping, a contrast with the weak, cynical disaffection of the Playmode-agency spokespeople. Hamaguchi keeps the camera at a distance from banal Takumi while the first private scene between the politely formal talent agents is shot from behind to make them nonspecific or impenetrable, as they reveal their career hopes. Mayazumi confesses that she feels “dysfunctional” in her soul, and Takahashi seems unfazed. As does Hamaguchi. This is the apostasy of the age, refusing to give these spiritually lost characters their proper complexity. The lack of logical character development in Evil Does Not Exist shows a failure to delve into the spiritual essence of political issues, thus Hamaguchi’s specious “enigmatic” narrative.

The impetuous title Evil Does Not Exist rings false. For truth, look to Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World or We Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians. Jude satirized the corruption of bureaucrats who carelessly deceive the public they despise; those Romanian films make sense as analogs mirroring America’s current collapse. But Hamaguchi dismisses the concept of “evil” as either sin or political betrayal. In the town-meeting scene, common-folk pushback against the developers is sentimentalized as informed anti-capitalism. Their clichés about upstream septic-tank pollution flowing downstream feel trite. This moment, nearly breaking into an uproar, fails to show the bureaucratic indifference we can recognize from our own “congestion-pricing” or “inflation-reduction” zealots.  (Hamaguchi’s only display of visual wit occurs when a corporate scumbag assumes the posture of a bored smoker in an office painting.)

Evil Does Not Exist isn’t a political film, but Hamaguchi mounts a bully pulpit. He has made an ideological horror movie based on climate-crisis sanctimony. Images of an animal’s skeletal remains, gut-shot bullet wounds, hoof and foot tracks in snow, a pheasant’s molting, a blood-drenched thorn, a deer set to attack a child — all create an ominous atmosphere similar to that in Last House on the Left. Even Takumi’s closed-off face resembles backwoods defectives. He calls himself a “local odd-jobs man,” yet this quiet, Jack-of-all-trades psycho is also an artist whose Audubon-worthy sketches give no clue that he might be capable of murder. Hamaguchi sanctifies Takumi as morally superior, a victim of “progress,” subject to both fate and vengeance. He personifies post-pandemic degradation.

Hamaguchi takes no stand on the tragedy of gentrification. Eric Rohmer handled these same issues with discrimination and refinement in The Tree, The Mayor and the Mediatheque without sentimentalizing political trends like the climate-change panic here. Hamaguchi denies the moral realities of today’s lockdowns, protests, and lawfare, absolving heinous behavior, such as Biden’s 2020 and still-repeated campaign denial: “Antifa doesn’t exist.” In his attempt to secularize morality, it’s obvious that Hamaguchi must not know the Morrissey lyric, “Is evil just something you are / Or something you do?”