A useful way to watch Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Evil Does Not Exist” is to pretend you don’t know its title. Without that little philosophical dare stapled to the poster, the film might initially play like a minor-key rural chronicle: a father, Takumi, living with his daughter Hana in the wooded outskirts of a fictional village near Tokyo; the quiet routines of hauling water and moving through winter landscape; a community being informed—ever so politely—of a plan to build a glamping site nearby. It sounds like the kind of premise that arrives pre-sanded into a tasteful “issue” movie, ready for export.
Hamaguchi refuses the sanding. The film has the texture of bark and cold air, and it keeps that texture even when it moves indoors, into fluorescent civic spaces where the real predator is language.
The premise’s hinge—developers proposing “a comfortable escape to nature”—isn’t treated as an abstract insult. The film’s conflict is stubbornly material. At the village meeting, the questions aren’t poetic (“What is nature?”) but procedural: water supply, wastewater management, the practicalities of a campsite being dropped into a local ecosystem that already has its own fragile logistics. Hamaguchi understands something that many environmental dramas miss: ecological damage is frequently administered as paperwork. It arrives as a plan, a schedule, a reassuring list of mitigations read aloud by people trained to keep their faces neutral.
That meeting scene is the film’s comic engine and its ethical trap. The outsiders—Tokyo representatives with scripts and a palpable wish to do their jobs without becoming villains—present a version of capitalism that is less snarling than it is bland. Their failure isn’t moustache-twirling greed so much as a confidence that whatever is messy can be “handled,” that a rural place is a surface for a concept. They seem sincere; and the villagers, precise and increasingly impatient, expose how sincerity can still be an instrument of harm.
Hamaguchi’s best films often turn on speech—how people talk around desire, grief, or power. Here, speech becomes a kind of soft weapon. Corporate phrases rub against local knowledge the way synthetic fabric rubs against skin: not dramatic, but irritating enough to become unbearable. The comedy is adult and slightly cruel. You can laugh at the representatives’ clumsy earnestness and still feel the tightening in your chest when you realize earnestness is exactly what allows the machine to keep running.
What makes “Evil Does Not Exist” feel unusually alive, though, is that it isn’t propelled primarily by dialogue at all. The project began, by Hamaguchi’s own account, from composer Eiko Ishibashi sending him new music; he initially imagined a short, dialogue-free visual accompaniment before expanding it into a feature after spending time in a rural community. Knowing that origin clarifies the film’s peculiar confidence in duration, in drift, in the way it can hold on trees and paths without asking your permission. This is a drama that behaves like a piece of music: introducing themes, letting them repeat with slight variations, then shifting key when you’ve settled into the groove.
Ishibashi’s score doesn’t function as “atmosphere” so much as a second narrator—cool, occasionally ominous, and strangely tender about the spaces between actions. It’s the film’s secret engine, the element that makes a walk through the woods feel like a moral inquiry. The music keeps suggesting that serenity and dread are adjacent rooms in the same house. You begin to hear the landscape as something that listens back.
That musical primacy also explains why “Evil Does Not Exist” can feel, at times, like it’s resisting conventional dramatic emphasis. Hamaguchi is not in a hurry to deliver the satisfactions of confrontation. Instead he builds a mood of watchfulness: the sense that every practical detail (water, waste, fire risk) contains a metaphysical echo. This is not the same thing as symbolism, and it’s important not to cheapen the film into an “eco-parable” you can translate into a slogan. Hamaguchi’s intelligence is more irritating than that: he makes you sit with the fact that moral certainty is not the film’s goal.
The title itself—blunt, almost adolescent in its absolutism—turns out to be a provocation. It dares you to locate evil, then steadily complicates the task. Is the evil the developer? The state? The city? The villagers? The father? Or is “evil” merely the name we give to outcomes no individual fully chooses? Hamaguchi seems fascinated by self-justification: the everyday ethical algebra people perform to remain decent in systems that produce indecent results.
There’s also a specifically contemporary residue in the developer side of the story. A profile has reported the glamping plan as an opportunistic pivot shaped by COVID-era economics—Tokyo business trying to generate revenue and leverage subsidies. If true, it adds a quietly sour note: the countryside being reimagined as monetizable “escape” precisely at the moment when urban life, under pandemic pressure, made escape feel like a necessity. “Nature” becomes not a place but a product category, a wellness accessory. Hamaguchi doesn’t hammer this; he doesn’t need to. The sheer banality of the pitch does the work.
Visually, the film’s calm is not the calm of prettification. It has the mobile, present-tense attentiveness of a camera that can live in natural light and cramped interiors without fuss. (A trade-style production note from Blackmagic Design claims the film was shot on a Pocket Cinema Camera 6K G2 and graded in DaVinci Resolve; brand press releases are not scripture, but the detail tracks with the film’s unshowy clarity and the sense of a camera that can move quietly through real spaces.) The images don’t romanticize rural life into postcard nostalgia. Winter woods are beautiful, yes, but they’re also dense, indifferent, and sometimes faintly threatening—exactly what you’d expect from a film that wants to keep the idea of “nature” from becoming a spa brochure.
Hitoshi Omika, as Takumi, anchors the film with a withholding presence. The performance has a practical gravity: a man who knows how to do things, and whose ethics are embedded in competence. That’s crucial, because Hamaguchi is playing a dangerous game. A less thoughtful film would turn Takumi into a simple avatar for righteousness and the villagers into a choir of wisdom. “Evil Does Not Exist” keeps slipping away from that comfort. The more you watch Takumi and Hana, the more you feel the film measuring something in them—not accusing, but refusing to grant them automatic innocence.
And then there is the matter of the ending, which has become, by most accounts, the film’s interpretive battleground. It’s jarring, and it’s meant to be. Hamaguchi has said he was surprised by some reactions and theories, which feels plausible: the finale doesn’t close a thesis; it detonates one. Without spoiling specifics, what’s striking is how the film’s last movement changes the emotional valence of what came before. The woods, previously a place of work and contemplation, begin to feel like a moral weather system. The human dispute—permits, meetings, logistics—suddenly seems too small to contain what the film wants to say about violence, responsibility, and the stories we tell ourselves to keep living.
If this sounds like a complaint—an art-film “mystery box” ending dropped in to generate discourse—it isn’t quite that. Hamaguchi’s ambiguity doesn’t feel like coyness. It feels like a refusal to let the audience exit with the tidy belief that problems can be solved by identifying the bad guys. The film insists, instead, on consequences: the way seemingly minor decisions and institutional habits accumulate into events that no one fully controls.
That insistence helps explain the film’s festival trajectory. Premiering in Competition at Venice and winning the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize positioned it, immediately, as arthouse prestige—an object for serious viewing, the kind of work international festivals are designed to anoint. Yet the film also has an unusually flexible afterlife: a re-edited, dialogue-free companion piece titled “GIFT,” designed to be shown with Ishibashi performing the score live. This isn’t a cute side project; it reveals something about Hamaguchi’s conception of cinema as modular, re-contextualizable—images that can be “played” differently depending on how sound is foregrounded. It’s a reminder that what we often call a film’s meaning is, in practice, a relationship between rhythm, attention, and the conditions of viewing.
Is “Evil Does Not Exist” perfect? Not exactly. Its pacing, so attentive to repetition and routine, may feel like a test of patience if you come wanting dramatic escalation. And its refusal to resolve cleanly can read, to some viewers, as an evasion. But those qualities are also its ethics. Hamaguchi is making a film about stewardship—of land, of community, of language—and he structures it like stewardship: slow, meticulous, allergic to shortcuts.
What lingers is not a message but a sensation: of being made to listen, not only to people but to systems, and to the uneasy music that runs underneath everyday civility. The film’s quietest achievement is that it makes modern politeness—the emails, the meetings, the good intentions—feel like something you should be afraid of. Not because it hides monsters, but because it can operate perfectly well without them.