Evil does not Exist

Japanese director Ryuchi Hamguichi makes critically acclaimed movies in the international art-house style.  His pictures tend to be very long (for instance, 2021's Drive my car clocking in at three hours) and win awards at festivals.  Evil Does Not Exist (2023) is shorter than his other films, less than two hours long, and intentionally unimpressive.  It's a bleak parable about the commercial exploitation of nature, really just an anecdote with a contrived ending.  The movie is interesting but there is nothing particularly special about it -- perhaps, the film's dour low-key tone is its whole point, but it makes the picture a hard-sell; I'm not sure I would recommend it.  The movie is made to provoke arguments about its enigmatic ending.  But there's not enough heat in this frosty movie to make those arguments particularly robust.  

It's Spring in a mountainous area of Japan, apparently within driving distance of Tokyo.  Some people live in a village of scattered metal cabins with slant roofs -- it looks like a colony of Norwegian or Swedish modernist cottages in a murky, greyish forest.  A man named Tatumi chops and splits wood, patrols the forest looking for ginseng and wild wasabi, and carries water from a unprepossessing stream back to his van for use in a local restaurant.  The water is used for soups with udon and soba noodles and the cafe owner (who is from Tokyo) says that it has a particular efficacy in the food that she prepares,  Tatumi has an eight-year old daughter named Hana who likes to roam the woods looking for fallen pheasant feathers.  Displayed on the walls of Tatumi's house are pictures of him with the child and a woman.  But the woman never appears in the movie and we assume that she had died -- however, the film is elliptical and it is merely an assumption that Tatumi is a widow; maybe, his wife moved away or divorced him.  We don't know.  Tatumi and Hana, while collecting water for the noodle place, find the skeleton of a deer in the forest.  Tatumi tells his daughter that the deer was gut-shot by hunters and died because of its wound.  Sometimes, we hear distant shots -- it's hunting season in these woods.  Hana gives a pheasant feather to an older man, the village's chief, a fellow named Sagura.  Everyone in the hamlet seems related to one another.

A bland-looking mostly silent woman and a slightly older man make a presentation to the villagers on behalf of some sort of talent agency and theatrical group called Playmode.  The company is planning to build a campground, really a sort of luxury hotel, in the forests for "glamping" -- this means "glamor camping."  The place will have comfortable tents, many BBQ pits, and a number of other amenities.  The presentation doesn't go well -- the villagers, including Tatumi, are suspicious.  The plans for the glamping facility are obviously defective -- the sewage system is too small to the number of units.  The BBQ pits will pose a risk of fire in dry weather -- "this place is dry and windy," a woman tells the presenters.  There are a number of other objections which the PR people can't address.  A young man with dyed blonde hair says that Playmode is in a hurry to build because of "subsidies" that will expire.  He gets so angry that he lunges out of his seat, only to be restrained by Tatumi.  The meeting is inconclusive and the villagers remain hostile to the project.  But the chief (or mayor), Sagura seems willing to make a deal -- it just has to be a better deal.  The PR team (the bland woman and the man) return to Tokyo where the boss tells them to get the deal done -- they are told to coopt Tatumi by offering him a job as caretaker for the property.  In fact, there are tax credits or subsidies about to lapse and Playmode is in a hurry to get the Glamping enterprise up and running -- the blonde punk was right.

The woman and man motor back to the village.  They both express dissatisfaction with their lives in Tokyo.  The woman has tried on-line dating with no success.  The man wants to get married and move away from the city.  The couple go Tatumi's house where he is splitting firewood.  (The man whose name is Mayuzimi tries to split logs with limited success but, when he is successful, he is very enthused and muses about moving to the woods to live with the villagers.)  The PR team and Tatumi eat at the noodle place and discuss the project -- the campground is going to be built along a deer path in the woods; deer, Tatumi tells them, are docile until they are pushed into a corner, but will, then, fight fiercely.  The eight-year old Hana is roaming in the woods, lured along the trails by a bird that she is following.  Later, she doesn't return and the villages organize a search party to find her.  Tatumi with  Mayuzimi finds the girl in the twilight -- she is staring at a wounded deer.  (Spoilers here follow.)  It's clear that the child is in danger due to her close proximity to the luxuriantly antlered and dying deer.  But instead of rescuing Hana, Tatumi decides to strangle the inoffensive Mayuzimi.  He throttles the poor guy into unconsciousness.   By the time, he has completed his assault, the deer has apparently gored Hana -- it's vanished and she's lying on the frosty ground with blood coming out her ear.  Tatumi picks up the girl and carries her back to the village.  Mayuzimi revives for a moment and staggers across the icy field but collapses again.  

The ending is intended as a riddle.  But it's an irritating riddle:  Tatumi's obtuse decision to assault Mayuzimi results in his daughter being badly injured, maybe, even killed.  It's obvious that Tatumi identifies with the beleagured deer -- although the animals are mostly passive, they will fight when cornered.  Tatumi apparently thinks that the Glamping proposal has cornered the villagers and triggered there "fight or flight" response.  But Tatumi may also be a malcontent and, even, mentally ill.  When he comes upon the skeletal remains of the deer, he says with confidence that it was "gut-shot" and died for that reason -- but objectively there's no way that he could reach that conclusion on the evidence of the skull and scattered bones.  Presumably Tatumi is projecting hs own anxiety about the Glamping project onto the dead deer.  In fact, the villagers, although opposed to the project, generally keep an open mind about it and seem willing, even anxious, to make a deal.  Clearly, the "chief" or mayor wants the project, which will be economically beneficial to the area, to be implemented.  The mayor says that people living "upstream" must not act irresponsibly to allow their sewage and garbage to pollute the places where people downstream live -- this the ethic by which he lives.  These concerns are embodied in a scene in which the blonde-haired punk, searching for Hana, runs down a slope next to a concrete trench full of water careening over many box-like steps as the creek descends.  It's a somewhat surreal image of water flowing through a rationalized, cube-like concrete trench. 

The film's photography is gloomy (it looks cold and dim) and the landscapes aren't impressive.  The villagers live in nondescript woods split apart by snowy meadows.  The mountain peaks are far away, dusted with snow.  Most of the scenery consists of brush and groves of trees.  The creek that supplies water for the cafe is a just a moist seep in the woods leaking a foot-wide stream down hill.  The people living in this area fancy themselves pioneers -- the woods were first opened up for settlement during the housing shortage after World War II.  But there's no privation and the people have nice-looking cottages and a reasonably well-equipped modern school  Now and then, we see hawks and a couple deer.  The movie goes out of its way to avoid turning the PR team into villains.  The woman and man are polite, listen carefully to the villagers, and, in fact, poor Mayuzimi is murdered when he has decided that he's going to move to the woods and join the villagers --he's sick and tired of the megalopolis.  Hamaguichi directs according the international art house paradigm style -- sequences are filmed in single shots that last three or four minutes (you will see lots of wood being split in this movie); the camera tracks morosely through the woods and there are, at least, four instances of the camera shooting upward into the grey (or moonlit) sky as the camera moves over the forest floor -- ghostly looking twigs and branches make a web overhead.  There are four shots (at least) taken from the back of a moving vehicle looking away from the direction of motion.  Camera set ups are held until people walk out of the frame and, then, the empty shot may linger for another ten seconds.  There are relatively few close-ups and many shots are deliberately inexpressive -- people talk with their backs to the camera or are filmed from great distances that obscure their features as they speak.  The sound design derives from some of Godard's pictures -- changes of scene are signaled by jarring sound cues; music abruptly stops when the film cuts away to another scene and the soundtrack is vivid with the sound of chain saws, cars and trucks starting, the thud of an axe splitting wood, the sounds of birds and flowing water. Most of the compositions feature bluish-grey monochrome highlighted here and there by splashes of bright red -- the paradigm for this is a scene in the woman from Tokyo cuts her finger on a thorn and we see the razor-sharp thorn dripping blood; the wounded deer has a red gouge in its side.  A red ball sits in the lead-colored school yard.  Hamaguichi labors to make nature look as gloomy and uninviting as his urban landscapes.-- it's just patches of snow and a jumble of barren-looking trees and brush.