#14: Evil Does Not Exist

Snow.

Glamping.

A wounded deer.

A poisoned well.

An actor’s demise.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow up to the resounding Drive My Car begins as a simple, environmentally conscious story of a small community standing up to a corporate invader. Evil Does Not Exist is a resounding foghorn highlighting the threat of ruin and poison in the sake of a “quick buck”.

The story unfolds naturally. We are shown snapshots of rural routine, and the small miracles—such as finding wild wasabi—that accompany such a simple life. Small joys lighten eyes of the country’s residents. Nature is community, that is being threatened by commodity.

Hamaguchi rallies behind the people when a talent agency / developer introduces a potential camping development to the valley. The town is quick to group up against the Tokyo intruders and prod into the holes of their plan, highlighting the blatant disregard for pollution and a haste to secure COVID relief funds.

Hamaguchi relishes in the underlying tensions of the town hall set piece. His tendency to hold on faces of speakers and strangers alike allows us to read what we could not here. A desperate plea to save a community, and an underlying fire to fight for it if need be. Numerous times the scene cuts to resounding shots of the forest, usually following Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), the town handyman’s daughter in her daily adventure. Gentle whispers to remind what the people risked to loose that would be swept away by greed.

The film takes its first of several sharp turns roughly an hour in, where perspective is shifted from Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), his daughter, and the village; to the pair of corporate ambassadors; Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani).

Hamaguchi’s filmmaking and camera work begins to abstract away from the routine he established from the first hour. The camera tends to admire screens, and the separation created in a digital world, and more often than not, as Takahashi and Mayuzumi begin to express doubts of their work, we examine an extended period where the camera shoots their backs from the back seat of a car.

The filmmaking continued its subtle transgressions. Why did Hamaguchi show us an extended shot of a forest far after humans had left the screen? Why would he shoot a conversation in a quasi-POV, only the camera was just behind his head rather than in front of his eyes?

Confused, yet delightfully entrigued, I waited. The endling, bombarded with sudden abstraction and carnivourous atmosphere, startled me to the point where I had trouble sleeping that night. It’s early realism hides its true nature just under the surface.

Nature is inherently tragic and uncaring. It is a cycle we hold no sway over. Humanity and nature may coexist, perhaps even thrive side by side in some cases, but we will never understand each other.

I also wanted to state that a while ago I was talking to a friend about Barry Jenkins, I think specifically around If Beale Street Could Talk, and one of us mentioned that “Jenkins could shoot a literal pile of shit and make it the best shot in all of cinema.”

Hamaguchi must’ve heard us and really said, “Hold my beer.”

Things I enjoyed:

Shout out to beaches. Beaches rule. As summer comes to a close, I spent one last hoorah and spent a day at my local beach with a friend. We chose to go late, to avoid the lunch crowd and the resulting horde of seabirds. The temperature was perfect, with a slight breeze for company, and the water was just cold enough to make each dive feel like a pulse of electroshock therapy. Just a cool day.

I really loved Between the Temples. Carol Kane is a goddess, I adore the warm hug-like film look of the grain and candles, and it was the only movie this year so far to make me both laugh and cry. Sometimes simultaneously.

There were things I liked and disliked about Alien: Romulus. Fede Alvarez was a great choice to helm this project, especially with his success revamping the Evil Dead franchise. I both grinned like a freak and rubbed my eyes in frustration at points. Maybe it’s just me, but isn’t an Alien movie supposed to be… scary? It’s such a shame, since the art direction, acting, and cinematography is kind of great, but the story just isn’t there. Some of the editing and kills are just straight up bad. And there was that SFX recreation of a dead actor from a previous movie. I will say, the final set piece did a lot to redeem the movie. Straight up sadistic. I’m actually impressed that a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster actually pulled off some of the most insane nightmare shit I’ve seen in recent memory.

I’m waiting for Pierce Brown to tear my heart out and play it like a fiddle with Iron Gold, the fourth novel of the Red Rising Saga. I took some time away from the science fiction epic to cull my too-long reading list, finally taking it up. And barely 100 pages in, I’m hooked right back in.