How Do You Know When the World Is Over?

Ryo Nishikawa in Evil Does Not Exist. Photo: Janus Films

Drive My Car director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist begins and ends with the camera tracking through a forest, looking up. In the first shot, daylight streams through the canopy of trees; the mood is contemplative. The later shot feels decidedly grimmer: Night is settling in, and the sky is a deep, dark, almost-black blue, the moon shining through a haze of what might be clouds or smoke, as we hear distressed breathing on the soundtrack. In between those two images lies a story that Hamaguchi tells in oblique, unassuming fashion, slipping in occasional moments of dreamy uncertainty so that his despondent, enigmatic, almost surreal ending takes us by surprise. This must be what it feels like to be the proverbial slowly boiling frog: Everything seems normal, then it starts to not seem normal at all. And then, before we have a chance to fully realize it, our world is over.

Hamaguchi’s greatest strength has been his ability to engagingly depict character interactions at what often feels like the pace of real life. So the quietly wandering, elliptical quality of the film’s early scenes feel like a bit of a departure from his recent and best-known work. We spend time with widower Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), who lives with his daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) and makes a living doing odd jobs in and around the village of Mizubiki, chopping firewood, harvesting plants, collecting water from the springs for the local ramen joint. After he picks Hana up from school — a task for which he’s often late — they stroll through the woods as he teaches her about different plants and animals, testing the little girl’s knowledge.

The peaceful life of this village is interrupted with the arrival of two representatives from a talent agency that’s planning to open a “glamping” business nearby. In the film’s most bravura scene, a pro forma slide presentation to a group of locals devolves into an extended confrontation when the villagers begin to ask questions about a variety of concerns, most notably the placement of the site’s new septic tank, which is too small for the number of expected customers and also upstream from the town’s fresh-water source. This is still a Ryūsuke Hamaguchi film, so the ensuing argument remains mostly understated; honestly, for a group of people who might be about to eat literal shit so that rich Tokyoites can pretend to rough it for a night, the citizens of Mizubiki seem admirably restrained.

Evil Does Not Exist rings unnervingly true in its particulars, from the bizarre bedfellows created by modern capitalism to the quiet contempt with which city folk treat poorer villagers. Why is a company like this getting into the glamping business in the first place? Why hasn’t it done the proper research and preparation? Why did it send talent agents to answer environmental and technical questions? There are government pandemic subsidies that are about to run out if they’re not used; the corporations are rushing, and besides, what would these yokels know? Surely they won’t mind a little feces dripping into their drinking water.

Hamaguchi treats these matters with astute focus and realism. He doesn’t give us obvious villains, instead portraying different people from different worlds, each trying to survive in their own way. Thus, we might not notice Evil Does Not Exist also has a strong undercurrent of dream logic running throughout. This element comes to the fore in the final act as a pall of despair takes over the film. We may not quite understand what’s happening narratively in these later scenes — Hamaguchi pointedly makes it hard to tell what’s a symbol, what’s an illusion, and what’s a flashback — but I suspect most of us will intuitively grasp what we’re watching. In its own discreet, modest way, Evil Does Not Exist leaves us with a haunting sense of personal and ecological apocalypse.