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Following the success of 2021’s Drive My Car, the Japanese director returns with an unsettling new film – here, he talks to Nick Chen about the secrets that lie behind it
A few years ago, on his blog, Steven Soderbergh uploaded a silent, black-and-white edit of Raiders of the Lost Ark, all to prove that Steven Spielberg’s staging, on its own, could convey everything required for the viewer. After winning an Oscar in 2022 for Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi had a similar ambition: he envisioned a film called Gift in which all audiences would hear is a live musical accompaniment composed by Eiko Ishibashi. When it came down to the shoot, though, the Japanese director realised he wanted dialogue.
So after releasing two films in 2021 with Drive My Car and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Hamaguchi premiered, in 2023, both Gift and Evil Does Not Exist, the latter being a more traditional version of Gift with audible words. “I had Azusa Yamazaki, who did the editing on Drive My Car, do the editing,” says Hamaguchi, in early March, through an interpreter. “Both of us watched the footage without sound, so that she could make judgements visually.” He found the silent visuals just as effective. “That’s the result of the actors really feeling something. It can be felt through the shots themselves.”
While Hamaguchi could have cashed in a blank cheque or gone to Hollywood after Drive My Car, he chose to remain in Japan, concocting something deliberately low-budget and confrontational. Even with dialogue, Evil Does Not Exist is, by design, a perplexing viewing experience; the kind of film where you hear multiple theories from cinemagoers as you stumble away, in a stupor, after the end credits. Still, Hamaguchi has, intentionally or not, created an awards-winner: it won Best Film at the London Film Festival and the Asian Film Awards; at Venice, it took home the Grand Jury Prize.
The premise itself is fairly simple. A Tokyo conglomerate wishes to establish a glamping site in a bucolic village that will disrupt the locals’ tranquil lifestyle. To gain building permission, two employees must visit the isolated community and distract them from the ecological harm their plans will create. From there, Hamaguchi’s screenplay spirals into bizarre, trancelike angles, raising questions that I’m not expecting him to answer. After all, the director is so secretive, he won’t even tell me where he is, geographically, on our Zoom call.
“Ultimately, Gift ended up having intertitles, so it has words, but it was a project I first thought of as having no sound,” says Hamaguchi. “I had to figure out how the visual elements would be entertaining.” Before brainstorming the story, the 45-year-old filmmaker and his cinematographer visited Harasawa to inspect the location and its woodland. “The shot of the trees at the beginning is something I’ve always wanted to use,” he says. “When I was my twenties, I remember walking around a park, looking at these bare branches. I thought this could pull the story together.”
With its unusual background, Evil Does Not Exist unfolds more like a piece of music than a traditional movie. For example, the shot of the trees reappears at the end like the refrain of a song, and much of the opening 10 minutes is a man chopping wood in the snow. Then again, Hamaguchi has often toyed with screenwriting traditions: Happy Hour is 317 minutes long, while Drive My Car takes an hour until the opening credits appear. “I try to veer away from the three-act structure when I write,” he says. “What concerned me was making the film in harmony with Eiko Ishibashi’s music. I didn’t know how the film would end up.”
With its loose planning, Evil Does Not Exist was shaped by coincidences during the shoot. Hamaguchi reveals that it was only on the last day that they managed to capture footage of deer – the film is, in hindsight, unthinkable without it – and a fantasy sequence involving Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), a Harasawa-based father and daughter, was created by accident. “In the dream, Hana and Takumi hold hands as they’re walking. However, in the first take we did, Hitoshi forgot to hold her hand, and just kept walking away.” Thus both shots are used, just one depicting a harsher reality. “It felt true to the character.”
“With almost all my films, I try to make sure the film can’t quite be solved with logic. Real life can’t be deconstructed or figured out through logic” – Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Elsewhere, Evil Does Not Exist lingers on haunting, penetrating images of tiny humans next to towering trees or a gigantic ice lake, as if each character is a trespasser heading towards their demise. When it’s apparent that the proposed glamping site will pollute the area, the environmental themes hit even harder. At least, that was my takeaway from a film that, as the mysteries accumulate, ends up like a serene, snowy, slightly blood-stained Rorschach Test. Although I have my own theory about deer and metaphors, it also seems to defeat the point: should I be feeling the film, rather than trying to solve it logically?
“The audience can do whatever they want,” says Hamaguchi. “However, with almost all my films, I try to make sure the film can’t quite be solved with logic. There’s something that doesn’t fit within reasoning. That’s what feels good to me when making movies. But, also, filmmaking is capturing one kind of reality, and making another kind of reality out of it. To me, real life can’t be deconstructed or figured out through logic. There’s a lot of mystery within the real life that we live in.”
Evil Does Not Exist opens in UK cinemas on April 5