Hypnotic Doing and Attentive Pausing: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s New Film Is a Pared-Down Eco-Thriller

Ryusuke Hamaguchi cannot be pinned down – that’s his strength as a filmmaker. As soon as he establishes a state of things, he crashes the state. He’s restless.

A lot of people will be baffled by Hamaguchi’s new movie Evil Does Not Exist (2023), perhaps even hate it. Those of us who were expecting the same emotional catharsis of 2021 masterpieces Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy will be sorely disappointed. Hamaguchi refuses to repeat himself, the sign of an artist with integrity and curiosity. At times, Evil does not even seem to be a movie; much as Shiguéhiko Hasumi said of Yasujirō Ozu’s films, Evil is a mystical zone in which cinematic things happen, but which approaches the limits of cinema. It is a good deal of things: a ruminative essay on nature, a piece of music, a cinematic study into how to chop wood, collect water or hold a town meeting. But not really a movie, not quite. The characters do not articulate their intentions, so they can be – and, judging by audience responses on Letterboxd, have been – misinterpreted as ‘unclear’ or ‘opaque’. Without the traditional opportunity to identify with the characters, we struggle to find a story through which we can be moved and forget ourselves. Instead, we confront the tools of emotion themselves, emotion in the raw.

Evil Does Not Exist is music by other means. In a deviation from the standard hierarchy of narrative filmmaking, in which a film starts with a scriptwriter and is finished by a director, Evil is a weaving synthesis of its writer-director Hamaguchi and its composer, the avant-garde jazz musician Eiko Ishibashi. They conceived the story together, then the former shot some images based on their plan, then the latter composed music based on those images, then Hamaguchi re-integrated these musical pieces into the final montage of film. The result, in which the score stands in for its film, is an ideal collaboration, that builds on Ishibashi work for Hamaguchi’s previous film Drive My Car. Ishibashi’s music brought out, sonically, that film’s expressions of grief, loss, hypnotic doing and attentive pausing – in a word, silence. To bring a musicality to silence is a difficult thing. Hamaguchi and Ishibashi accomplish it.

What even is this new Hamaguchi film, which is already provoking exasperated responses: ‘Too long’, ‘Characters are opaque’, ‘I didn’t get it’? Basically, it’s a poetically pared-down eco-thriller: a company sends two lackeys (Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani) to a fictional village in the countryside. They are to tell the locals that a luxury camping site will be installed in their town, one that will bring Tokyo tourists into the village. Most of the locals are opposed. One in particular, the town’s highly respected but aloof handyman Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), is doubtful of the project. The lackeys, like all tourists, love the countryside and love the distant, mysterious vibes of Takumi. They want what he represents. But they don’t really see him. They try to recruit Takumi to their side. They will soon realize they are not dealing with an ordinary force. Takumi is, like the film in which he appears, a good deal of things: he is a grieving husband, he is a father whose daughter does not quite realize the danger of the dark woods outside her childhood home, he is the wind, he might be a deer. In his deep silent communion with nature, he might be Nature itself. And he is angry.

Evil Does Not Exist is an angry film. It is angry at the political state of the world, angry at those who abuse the earth, angry at a state where a father loses his entire family and is told to forget himself and to move on. It doesn’t come right out and say it – par for the course with Hamaguchi – but you feel the weight of frustration, exhaustion, a monstrous acceptance of the daily cruelty of everyday life. This anger, as evoked by Hamaguchi and Ishibashi is steely, almost Apollonian. Hamaguchi here downplays his dialogue, the element of his films for which, up until Evil, he has been most praised. Here, what’s centred is precisely music: the beyond of speech. The tears are evoked by Ishibashi’s plaintive, mournful, discordant songs. To hear her music is to take up arms against the crushing banality of indifference, a far greater wrong in this modern world than capital-E ‘Evil’.

Perhaps I can offer one clue, in the form of a tell-tale intertitle in Gift (2023), the remixed, silent-film version of Evil Does Not Exist made specifically for Ishibashi’s live concerts. Gift is twenty minutes shorter but features scenes that do not appear in Evil; save for an eerie public service announcer over an intercom, it is devoid of any voices or sound-effects except for Ishibashi’s score. And the action is told to us through intertitles. One card stands out: ‘That night, Hana [the protagonist’s daughter] had a dream. A dream of happiness. In it, she dreamed she was a bird. Then a deer, the wind, her father, and herself.’ This line appears nowhere in Evil Does Not Exist, but it serves to silently define it. It’s as if it were dropped in from one of F.W. Murnau’s elemental fables about Men and Women struggling to love in a fallen world. This intertitle – a ‘gift’, as it were – might be the key to Hamaguchi and Ishibashi’s strange, crazy, wonderful project. Evil Does Not Exist is about feeling so much love for the world that, as in a dream, a person is all things – and then, because of an unseen bureaucracy, they are tragically forced to be one thing. We cannot be one thing. We have the right to explode in anger – as long as it is based within the principles of love, of care.

I have spoken with Hamaguchi and Ishibashi about the film. I’ve seen Gift, and Evil four times. I am still not closer to unravelling its rich tapestry of sensations. I’m glad of that. It’s a rare thing in our world of movies: the withheld, the sublimely ambiguous. Like music, it must be listened to again and again for its pulses, its pauses, to be remembered. Watch it twice. Watch it three times. Slowly, over many watches, Evil Does Not Exist will reveal its melancholic power, like a Beatles song about a girl who’s left you, or a Chopin nocturne.

_{Main Image: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Evil Does Not Exist, 2023, film still. Courtesy: Sideshow/Janus Films}