‘Evil Does Not Exist’ Review: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Tale of Rural Gentrification is a Tone Poem with an Atonal End
variety.comJessica Kiang A wild deer with a hunter’s bullet in its belly may attack a human, no matter how mild its nature normally. This is one of the droplets of woodland wisdom dispensed by the otherwise taciturn Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), the woodcutter, water-gatherer and all-round odd-job-man of Mizubiki village, the setting of “Drive My Car” director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s meditative and moving, yet ultimately unsettling new feature.
Takumi’s few words all relate to such matters: the flow of a stream, the thorns on a Siberian Ginseng, the tang of wild wasabi.
They are pastoral litanies as spartan and lilting as “Evil Does not Exist” itself, right until a last-minute reversal calls its strange title back to mind and into question.
Even if evil does not exist in this peaceful, bucolic community, injustice and animal instinct certainly do. From the outset indicating the centrality of composer Eiko Ishibashi’s score, we are drawn into the film with a long musical excerpt, only accompanied by fluid tracking shot, looking upward: a tracery of tree branches, feathered out against a winter sky.
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