Final Rating: 5/5
When my friends and I got our first round of vaccinations after the pandemic in spring 2021, we rented a car and an Airbnb and drove up about an hour on I-87 to the town of New Paltz. After spending the day hiking the nearby nature preserve and sampling the local breweries, I threw together a bonfire in the backyard. As a former Boy Scout, it’s a personal point of pride that I’m able to construct a campfire relatively quickly and with minimal aids such as lighter fluid or store-bought starters. It’s a skill I honed over a decade of Thanksgivings in Northeast Florida, where instead of having turkey and mashed potatoes, my family and I would have steak and s’mores.
It was the only long weekend per year that wasn’t sweltering hot that my dad could consistently get off from his job at the hospital. Sure it was tent camping in an RV park with a bathroom around the corner and a Publix Supermarket a 10 minute drive away, but it still let us believe we were disconnecting from our day to day routines of work or school. It let us be in nature and cook our own food with our own hands on a fire we ourselves started.
There’s a certain zen like practice I’ve honed down over the years of creating a chimney with the logs you want to use to maximize airflow, with a small teepee of carefully selected kindling in the center, which itself sits over a small bed of tinder – perhaps newspaper shavings or dried palm leaves. And then once you use your match or lighter to get it started, carefully fanning the flame without blowing it out till it is self-sustaining really gives you a sense of accomplishment no amount of social media likes or follows can replicate.
Two thirds of the way through Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, we follow a Tokyo salaryman and his colleague who have come to our main protagonist Takumi to try to convince him to be the caretaker of their ill-advised glamping development. Takumi is chopping firewood. A task that we have seen him do in one of the earlier scenes in the movie – and we know that it may take a while. Hamaguchi’s long continuous shots of the task at hand earlier are meditative and hypnotic. Physical and demanding, yes, but Takumi, played by Hitoshi Omika, shows a mastery over the task where it doesn’t feel frustrating.
However, with an audience of Tokyoites awkwardly watching over him, the frame feels crowded and almost absurd; the audience at my screening actually started chuckling at how out of place the city folk seemed. Once Takumi is done, the salaryman asks if he can give it a go. And to increasingly loud laughter from my screening, he tries to copy Takumi’s smooth downard swings of the axe, either applying too much force or missing the log entirely. After a few failed tries, Takumi gives him a few pointers and he nails it, to cheers from my auditorium. As he wipes off his brow after that single swing, the salaryman exclaims how great it feels to have accomplished it, which leads to him declaring that maybe he’ll become the caretaker instead after Takumi teaches him the ways of rural life.
Originating from a request by Eiko Ishibashi (the musician who scored Hamguchi’s previous film Drive My Car) to create the visuals for a live musical performance (which will premiere at the Belgium FIlm Festival later this month using much of the same footage as Evil Does Not Exist), Hamaguchi immersed himself in the rural area around Ishibashi’s studio. As he described in the conversation after the screening, this film is divided into three acts – the first act reflecting Takumi and his relationship with his daughter Hana, and how he and the rest of his small community of 6000 interact with nature.
Much as we see every shot of him chopping wood, we also see how much effort goes into carrying jugs of fresh spring water by hand across an unpaved path to deliver to the local udon shop, only to stop and point out some wild wasabi leaves that he recommends adding to the menu. Takumi embodies a sort of platonic ideal modern day man of the wild – not necessarily eschewing technology, as his four wheel drive makes clear, but also one who teaches his daughter how to tell apart different trees as he meets her walking home from school by herself. He has found peace in their way of life, despite some unnamed cause for the mother of his child’s absence. In a sense it reminds of me iyashikei or “healing” anime I enjoy that often take place in nature such as Barakamon, a series about a calligrapher who retreats to the countryside to find inspiration and discovers a found family, or Yuru Camp, a story about a group of high school girls who simply love camping in the winter.
Part two as Director Hamaguchi described focuses on the aforementioned Tokyo folk, who come to pitch the (justifiably skeptical) community on their glamping project as an escape from the stress of the city, with cheery royalty free music in the background of their video presentation. They explain that glamping comes from the combination of the words glamorous and camping. In the Q&A after the presentation, it becomes clear that these company representatives are in way over their head – when asked about the capacity and location of the septic tanks, or of the risk of wildfires from unruly youth given the lack of 24 hour caretakers. Their increasingly repetitive non-answers of “we’ll take it under consideration” got increasingly louder reactions from my audience. Allegedly this presentation and poor reaction was actually based on the true story of something similar that happened near Ishibashi’s town.
One thing that stood out to me here was just how masterful Hamaguchi was able to control the pacing of each part. Where the first part of the film was meditative and reflective with shots of nature lingering, here the terror of business hierarchy rears its head. These lower level employees seem to have their heart in the right place but it’s shown that they are caught between a rock and a hard place as their company president doesn’t see the value of getting to know the needs of the community firsthand as they request and calls the community session a resounding success.
As they drive out to try again, much like Hamaguchi’s prior work Drive My Car they bemoan their work situation, with the lulls in conversation included as much as he intended with every swing of the axe in woodcutting. While perhaps this wasn’t Hamaguchi’s intent, I certainly sympathized most with these city folk stuck in the corporate rat race for years who want an escape (who ironically are trying to set up an escape from the city that would ruin the very place they are escaping to – a damned if you do damned if you don’t scenario which more or less sums up life as a 30-something millennial in our capitalist society).
After the glamping project employee tries his hand at chopping wood, but the rather sudden, abrupt and tonally different conclusion brings into question the statement the title of the film proposes. If evil does not exist, what is evil and what causes strife in the world? For Hamaguchi, it seems to be a disconnect from nature. Or perhaps, it may simply be trying to muscle in to be part of something you haven’t truly learned what it means to be a part of. A form of stolen valor so to speak. Or maybe it’s capitalism itself. Maybe, strife is caused by all of us – father, low level employee, or nature itself – doing what we need to to survive and protect our way of life.
While not as long as his most recent Best Picture nominated film Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist still has a gripping pace and beautiful and creatively minimalist cinematography. According to Hamaguchi, they focused on making the humans small in frame to maximize the impact of nature. It is surprisingly funny throughout and even if it isn’t Japan’s submission to Best International Feature this year, is most certainly worth a watch.
Evil Does Not Exist was seen at the New York Film Festival.
