Evil Does Not Exist

by Rio C.

You’re laid down on a boat moving down a forest stream, a penetrating all-knowing grand canopy gazing down upon you.

The film opens up with a music score that's melancholic but serene, gentle but potent with nostalgia—something that you fall asleep to, only to find yourself waking up with a jerk to a mini crescendo. And you zone in and out of consciousness, cascading through the strings of the instrument, and before you know it, it's fallen too dark outside and you find yourself fighting the haze of drowsiness, hands feeble and body heavy.

You're just a passenger in a boat without a destination, the music your (unreliable) guide. As it continues to rise and fall unexpectedly, you tell yourself to give up trying to understand what it should make you feel. You feel peaceful before this peace is overthrown by a derisive gloom, and you're constantly at war within yourself, unable to tell whether the notes carry foreboding or fear. And this is how you lose yourself in the dense foliage. Because the music was never your guide, only a companion for the journey. The music was what you made of it.

The camera angles put you in the perspective of an entity of nature following these people, who both make and break it, around—briskly but quietly albeit a little clumsily, like an eager foal hoping to catch sight of something curious, something human. The shifting perspectives create people out of characters, as you witness them brush into each other’s lives and stories.

You'd do well to accept that the film will take you wherever the stream carries it. As water flows down from the top to the bottom, diverging and converging with little side streams taking birth and fading out, you do not know whether this story will take you into the ocean, wide and unknowing (but sure), or whether it will abandon you at the outskirts of the forest where it takes its last breath amongst mountains of crushed soda cans and candy wrappers.

On Evil Does Not Exist (2023) directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.