Evil Does Not Exist

The first twenty minutes of Evil Does Not Exist consist almost entirely of a man collecting water and chopping wood. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) lives in the mountain village of Mizubiki, two hours from Tokyo, and his relationship with the forest is entirely practical: he knows which water is clean, he knows how to split a log along its grain, he knows how the land works. Hamaguchi films this in long, patient takes, with Eiko Ishibashi’s extraordinary score — originally composed for a different project, repurposed here — building underneath like weather.

The film’s conflict arrives in the form of a planning proposal. A Tokyo-based talent agency wants to build a glamping facility in the forest near the village. Two company representatives, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), are sent to hold a community meeting. The meeting scene — the film’s centrepiece — is vintage Hamaguchi: a long, carefully blocked exchange in which the representatives’ corporate optimism is slowly, methodically dismantled by the villagers’ specific, practical objections. The septic tank is too small and too close to the water source. The staff won’t be there at night. These are not ideological objections; they are technical ones, and they are devastating.

The Ecology of Complicity

What the film does with its two company representatives is subtle and important. Takahashi and Mayuzumi are not villains. They are people who have been handed a bad brief by management and sent to manage it. Over the course of their visits to Mizubiki, they begin to see the village through different eyes, and Hamaguchi tracks this shift with the same patient attention he gives to everything. The question the film accumulates around is whether seeing differently is enough — whether recognition without structural power constitutes anything meaningful.

“The title is not ironic. Or it is ironic, but not in the way you expect. By the end, you understand it as a statement about distributed guilt — the evil that exists in systems rather than agents, in accumulations of small decisions rather than any single act.”

Hamaguchi, coming off the international success of Drive My Car (2021), has made a smaller, stranger, more formally radical film. Where Drive My Car was expansive — three hours, multiple languages, Chekhov — Evil Does Not Exist is compact and somewhat cryptic. Its final act, which I will not describe except to say that it involves Takumi’s daughter Hana and the forest at dusk, is the most genuinely unsettling thing Hamaguchi has put on screen. It is not explained. It does not need to be.

See this film in a theatre if you can. Ishibashi’s score is not optional.