This Japanese eco-drama will leave you perplexed: NPR

Ryô Nishikawa plays Hana in Evil does not exist.

via Janus Films

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via Janus Films

Ryô Nishikawa plays Hana in Evil does not exist.

via Janus Films

What do you do after directing a talky three-hour Japanese drama that became a critical darling and a major arthouse hit and received four Academy Award nominations, including one for Best International Feature Film?

If you are Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, the talented 45-year-old filmmaker behind Drive my caryou step back and go for a long walk in the woods, looking for fresh air and new ideas.

The result is a fascinating new film, Evil does not existwhich leaves behind the essentially urban settings of Hamaguchi’s first films like Happy Hour And Asako I and II. The action takes place in a rural village a short drive from Tokyo, which is home to a close-knit community of around 6,000 people.

The first two characters we meet are a young girl named Hana and her single father, Takumi, a lumberjack who knows the surrounding forest better than anyone. The film establishes a gently pastoral pace, following father and daughter as they wander through the woods, identifying trees and other plants and occasionally coming across dead deer.

Takumi, wonderfully played by Hitoshi Omika, knows their presence here is disruptive, but he and his fellow citizens strive to be good, responsible stewards of the land. So they are furious when they learn that a company is planning to build a glamping resort in the area, with potentially disastrous environmental consequences.

And so Evil does not exist begins as a sort of ecological parable, pitting city dwellers against real estate developers. The centerpiece is a brilliantly written and performed sequence in which company representatives meet with locals, promising them that the campsite will attract tourists and boost their economy.

But residents are not fooled, and one by one, they raise issues, from the risk of forest fires from barbecues to the septic tank that would pollute the town’s water supply. The sequence has some of the texture of a Frederick Wiseman documentary, and it’s also adept at turning a community center slideshow into gripping drama.

There is a turning point in the story when one of the company’s representatives — Takahashi, played by actor Ryûji Kosaka — seems to fall under the spell of this wooded region and even dreams of settling there. For a while, it seemed like the film might be the story of a city mouse turned country mouse.

But nothing about Evil does not exist turns out to be predictable. As he has done before, Hamaguchi gives us characters who are too complicated and too richly drawn to be reduced to a single type. Still, that doesn’t explain how strangely different this film is from his other works.

It’s less written and the tone is more disturbing. The musical score, composed by Eiko Ishibashi, is both lush and foreboding, and it often stops abruptly, to disorienting effect. The landscape outside is filmed in crystal clear beauty, but the longer you watch, the more eerie the images become. Sometimes Hamaguchi positions the camera at ground level, looking up, as if to show us the perspective of the earth itself. In these moments, the human characters suddenly seem strangely alien, just like the intruders they are.

I saw Evil does not exist several times now, and each time it has captivated me, only to leave me deeply disturbed. A lot of this has to do with the ending, which is confusing and has already sparked much debate. I’m still grappling with the ending and what it says about human compulsion to dominate one’s environment. I’m also still getting the hang of the title. It’s as if Hamaguchi is trying to get us to look at the natural world, including human beings, beyond the comforting framework of good versus evil.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the character of Takumi, who Omika plays with an inscrutability that both frightens and draws you in. He may be a loving father and guardian of the earth, but Takahashi misinterprets him at his peril. It’s the performances of the two main actors that keep you following the shocking final moments. Whether evil exists or not, I’m glad such a mysterious and powerful film makes.