Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s sublime eco-fable, Evil Does Not Exist, begins and ends with the plangent score by Ishibashi Eiko, played fortissimo over an extended tracking shot facing skywards. A forest canopy, stark and stripped of its foliage by winter’s spell, appears like latticework through which daylight passes with an eerie vibrancy. Riding this sonic wavelength, one is immediately locked into the film’s peculiar pitch, a mix of awe, fragility, and horror quite unlike the Japanese filmmaker’s previous work. Instead, this foreboding feature hews closer to the films of Hamaguchi’s former teacher and occasional collaborator Kurosawa Kiyoshi, whose films strike a similarly otherworldly balance of moody contemplation ambiguous dread (the woodlands mystery Charisma [2000] stands out as a clear parallel).
Evil Does Not Exist, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, is an offshoot of a separate collaboration between Hamaguchi and Ishibashi, a multi-instrumentalist and composer whose first score for the director was for Drive My Car (2012). Gift, a silent film that Hamaguchi conceived to complement a live performance by Ishibashi, provided the raw materials for Evil Does Not Exist, in which the familiar trappings of a drama about ecological preservation and small-town existence threatened by corporate sprawl are enriched and expanded by Hamaguchi’s patient gaze.
As the film begins, cinematographer Kitagawa Yoshio’s camera observes the routines of a stoical widower, Takumi (Omika Hitoshi), a handyman who chops wood and collects stream water to be used by a local udon shop.
