Evil Does Not Exist — CIFF 2023 Review
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest, Evil Does Not Exist, teeters on the precarious ledge of an idea that, although deer are gentle creatures that largely avoid humans, one that has been gut-shot will fight back. This reminds me a bit of a similarly metaphor-laden quote from Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke: “cut off a wolf’s head and it still has the power to bite.” Wolves and deer can be seen as almost polar opposite beings, but there’s some overlap in meaning here. Why would a wolf’s head bite? There’s no self-preservation left to be had, but Miyazaki’s fantastical wolves have one more bite in them, one last desperate, primal, dying act, perhaps as mindless revenge or perhaps to protect the rest of the pack.
Deer operate off of fear and confusion. When they’ve been shot, anyone can be the target, not just the person whose bullet left the chamber. Their tranquil existence has been interrupted, and so even the least violent creature may violently lash out in a desperate measure to return to that peace.
“A little pollution won’t affect the water.”
Hamaguchi is a master, and the fact that he happened to follow Drive My Car’s Oscar win with a film like this is only further proof of that. It’s a film that came organically (beginning as a much shorter audiovisual collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi before ballooning into a feature film), and as such feels astoundingly assured and unpressured to be anything other than what it needs to be. His precision is still very much there, but he has also let his filmmaking idiosyncrasies take more of a center stage, leading to a film where every abrupt cut tells a story, where the music takes over completely in some scenes but in others makes way for the subtle organic sounds surrounding the camera, where his usual skills in framing and staging are used for effective comedy in some moments and ever-ratcheting tension in others.
The director’s usual extended dialogue scenes are there, but the apparent main character does not participate in them, and we learn very little of the ways characters hurt beyond the fact that they just do. There are driving scenes, but here, unlike in Drive My Car, the car is not really a place where guards are let down and relationships deepen. Some understanding slips through, but there’s also tension, there are lies, and there’s so much left unsaid. Some scenes feels like stage plays, inserted between serene naturalistic explorations of the landscape, and in fact one character was once an actor, and you get to wondering how much he’s still acting.
I’ve noticed that each of Hamaguchi’s films that I’ve seen — this being just my fourth, regrettably — has prominently featured the idea of searching for answers in someone who couldn’t possibly hold them, particularly when motivated by grief. Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t fit neatly into that pattern, but it can be understood as a bit of a sinister twist on the general concept, where perhaps answers aren’t being sought, but instead the evil. But much like those unanswerable questions, evil is a nebulous thing. It both exists and doesn’t exist, it can’t be grasped so easily.
Hamaguchi has recommended understanding this film as if it were a symphony, because not only was it built directly off of Eiko Ishibashi’s music, but the film itself is inspired by music as a whole in the way structure, tone, and themes are approached. This extends to even the title, which were words that came to him as he was gazing out at nature. Words that can perhaps be believed in that fleeting moment of peace, but not in a broader sense. It’s a title that generates meaning because it comes from a disparate place, disconnected from the rest of the work except for the fact that they came from the same mind that conceived it all.
I think this movie can be best described by the uncertainty of the scattered applause that the audience I saw it with presented as the credits rolled. It’s a film that resists such an immediate reaction, and it doesn’t give you time to think about what it leaves you with. In fact, this review just 24 hours after seeing it is probably premature itself. I’m fascinated to know how the film will be looked back upon many years in the future, when Hamaguchi has a few more films under his belt and this is one film sandwiched within an oeuvre. But I won’t get ahead of myself.
