A Tense Harmony: Reviewing Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist”

Evil Does Not Exist, the latest film by critically acclaimed Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September. The film, which was shown at the 2023 San Diego Asian Film Festival (SDAFF) last November, plays out like a piece of slow cinema, an ecocritical film, and a magical realist piece all in one. The film portrays the interaction between the villagers of Mizubiki, a mountain village near Tokyo, and a development company that wants to build a glamping site in the area.

Evil Does Not Exist leaves you sitting on the edge of your seat for the whole movie. You never quite know why you’re so disquieted by the film. There’s no real threat of violent conflict, nor is there the sort of tragic defeatism one might often associate with human development vs. nature storylines, but a sense of unease is undeniable. Yoshio Kitagawa, the film’s cinematographer, often frames shots so as to make you hyper-aware of your own viewership. Characters obscured by brown grasses or stark trees as they wander the forest highlight the extreme subjectivity of the camera. There’s no claim to objectivity or fly-on-the-wall verisimilitude. Instead, you get the feeling that you’re stalking these characters through the mountains, following them through the gaze of some unknown being — perhaps a deer, the forest itself, or even a voyeuristic spirit.

While the film focuses on the town’s jack-of-all-trades Takumi, played by Hitoshi Omika, and his daughter Hana, played by Ryo Nishikawa, Hamaguchi quietly rejects the necessity of a single protagonist, broadening its focal range to portray a complex, interwoven community seated in the natural world. When Takahashi and Mayuzumi, representatives for a company seeking to develop a glamping site in Mizubiki, come to propose their project to the villagers, Hamaguchi sets up what would appear to be the central conflict of the film. While most narratives centralize human conflict in order to grant their work the stakes necessary to maintain an audience’s attention, Evil Does Not Exist challenges the centrality of conflict in narrative storytelling just as he challenges the importance of a main character.

Hamaguchi chooses to foreground harmony instead: harmony in the relationships between the villagers, harmony between the villagers and nature, and harmony between villagers and developers. Much of Evil Does Not Exist is composed of wide shots and pans of the mountains surrounding Mizubiki. Similarly, the beautiful classical score of the film, composed by Eiko Ishibashi, is excellently braided with the peaceful field recordings by sound designer Izumi Matsuno. In one scene, mournful cello blends into the sounds of footfalls against frozen grass, in another, the sounds of a creek fade into a piano melody.

Throughout the film, characters are obscured by trees or hills as the camera pans along individuals walking through the woods. We are left wondering whether the characters are even the most important piece of the film. The score and the cinematography both foreground the beauty and lyricism of the natural world, allowing the environment to obscure as much as it enlightens. Although this may make the film sound slow, the film is riveting because Hamaguchi forces the viewer to reconsider what is actually important in a narrative and whether we are taking the centrality of humanity for granted.

The tropey narrative of “small town vs. greedy developers” is challenged as the film examines each of its characters with delicate care. The glamping site developer Takahashi, played by Ryuji Kosaka, is not a money-grubbing elite in search of the next landscape to defile. Instead, he’s an awkward, bumbling guy dissatisfied with his city life and his job, who eventually comes to recognize the beauty of the mountains surrounding him.

In one of the most striking scenes of the film, Takahashi and his co-worker Mayuzumi, played by Ayaka Shibutani, help Takumi fetch water from a mountain spring. They carefully fill jugs of water, accompanied only by the sounds of the woods and their own heavy breathing, before lugging them to Takumi’s truck. From the spring there grows a physical connection between Takahashi and the land he was previously alienated from. The central development of Takahashi’s character is never the empathetic development or lack of empathetic development for the people of Mizubiki but for the natural world itself.

The film is unsettling, engaging deeply with the natural world, and leaving you uneasy as you exit the theater. While watching it at the SDAFF, the crowded theater was almost entirely silent, the audience immersed wholeheartedly in the eerie atmosphere of Hamaguchi’s new and excellent film.

Tate McFadden is the Arts and Culture Editor and Opinion Editor for The Triton.