'Evil Does Not Exist' is brilliant… until it isn't

by Mitchel Green - October 6, 2024

| mitchelgreen34@gmail.com source: The Movie Database

Why do beautiful, low-key films feel the need to unnecessarily ratchet up the drama in their final moments in ways that don’t make thematic or emotional sense? I ran into this issue last year with A. V. Rockwell’s “A Thousand and One,” which has a reveal in its final 10 minutes that poorly recontextualizes the narrative to such a negative degree that it almost ruins the film completely. Now I find myself again faced with a contender for one of the year’s best that stumbles so badly at the finish line that I wonder if the movie was any good to begin with.

Of course, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film “Evil Does Not Exist” (finally on streaming in the United States after premiering over a year ago at the Venice Film Festival) was very good for its first hour and a half, that’s what makes the final 15 minutes so aggravating. For much of its runtime, the film is a languid stroll through nature, finding beauty in the mundanity of this remote community, its people, and their day-to-day tasks. These are people who care about their environment and others around them, which is what makes the film’s second act so devastating.

A PR team hired by a nameless, faceless corporation comes in to hold a town meeting about a luxury camping resort — the contradictory nature of which is not lost on the village’s citizens — being built upriver from their community. The PR team is a pawn, sent only to feign care for the people this highly profitable business is going to negatively impact, and they are generally useless as the townspeople push back in increasingly desperate attempts to show the company the errors of their methods. They can’t answer questions in ways that are helpful because they aren’t experts on the subject. All they have is the information people higher up than them have given. This is a setup and is what the film’s title refers to. These people who have been sent to, in their minds, listen to and help the people of this community are not bad people. They truly want to help, as they try to show when they return to the village after failing to push back against the CEO’s demands. But evil does exist, the characters just can’t see it. The existential threat these people face is going to destroy them whether they like it or not.

Or at least, that’s where it feels like the film is heading before it takes a turn into a missing child plot it foreshadowed in the opening sequence. There are a couple of cheap fakeouts with hearing gunshots in the distance or seeing blood on a tree branch that ends up being from a cut on one of the PR rep's hands. This doesn’t work for many reasons. For one, it’s too predictable once it starts down that path. We’ve already been primed to expect how this is going to play out. For another, it is a complete shift in tone and aesthetic approach — opting for a more intense and operatic ending to a film that had to this point thrived on naturalism. But worst of all, it shifts a film that was about the inevitable destruction of the planet brought on by modern society’s quest for capital into a film about how nature will always win out, even if man tries to destroy it. Or is it? The film’s clear arguments become increasingly muddled as the ending descends into abstraction.

The film still has enough greatness in it that its climactic collapse does not soil the entire experience. I just wish Hamaguchi trusted himself and his audience more. We can be moved by minimalism. In fact, we have been for an hour and a half! Guide us gently the rest of the way. The message is a strong one. We don’t need theatrics to listen. It undermines the reality of the situation.