Developments: "Evil Does Not Exist"

After the success of 2021's Drive My Car - which spun off the festival circuit and up the red carpet to Oscars glory - the Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has retreated into the woods, although whether he means to bathe in nature or lurch into horror remains uncertain for much of Evil Does Not Exist. That title, for starters, isn't as definite a statement as one might want, given what we know of this world; chiselled into thin ice, it looks more and more like a theory being tested over the course of 105 minutes. Hamaguchi now sets us down in a forest outside Tokyo: a bit on the chilly side as we arrive - this apparently being late autumn/winter - but more often than not sundappled, and soothing when observed, as this camera often does, from the bed of a truck passing beneath the overhanging branches. And while we hear gunshots in the distance, we are reassured that these are from hunters several towns out of range. We traverse these trails in the company of a terse, self-contained single father, Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), and his free-roaming daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa), whom Takumi is teaching to identify trees by their bark and recognise the pawprints in the snow across a frozen lake. Yet this life of quiet self-sufficiency is under threat from a leisure conglomerate calling itself Playmode, whose representatives have come to the area from the big city with fancy PowerPoint presentations and vapid corporate speak, announcing their intentions to turn some small but valuable part of the forest into a glamping site. What Hamaguchi initially sets us to wondering is whether or not it is still possible to live in nature, when there are forces in this world keen to buy and tear it up, to turn it into something unaffordable, inaccessible, frankly unnatural.

Again, this filmmaker presents as a cinematic novelist, steadily accumulating a wealth of narrative and character detail paid off in the film's home stretch. Yet he's working more stealthily than usual here, as if the foliage of this forest was chosen to provide him with cover - time to think and breathe - after his international breakthrough. As late as ninety minutes into Evil Does Not Exist, we're unsure which direction the film is heading in; some viewers will likely exit the cinema wondering what just happened. In the meantime, Hamaguchi sets himself to covering as much ground as possible, as assiduously as he can. It's possible you won't ever have thought this long or hard about the environmental implications of glamping, or the precise placing of a septic tank, but then one of the reasons Hamaguchi's cinema has been so embraced is the corrective it provides to the careless, sketchy screenwriting going on elsewhere in modern movies. There is consequence here, demonstrable cause and effect. A poorly placed septic tank would seep into the local water table, and affect the taste of the spring water Takumi bottles to sell to nearby restaurants, so it's no surprise news of the glamping project leaves a sour taste in the locals' mouths. Yet their concerns only casually emerge, first over the dinner table, then - at greater length - in an expertly directed and performed school-hall meeting which lays out the many different hells that might be about to break loose. Even here, though, the situation is shown to be more complex than it would be in any comparable American feature. Playmode's representatives have a job to do, yes, but they're also polite, even deferential to their hosts, accepting feedback and offering jobs in return. Nothing about the film is a done deal; for a while, I wondered if some Local Hero-style osmosis was about to take place, with the outsiders themselves coming to bed down in this most abundant of settings. These characters are, after all, rooted in their environment, and could in theory be purified or polluted; and Evil is so non-prescriptive, so open to outside elements, that it often appears in active conversation with Better Call Saul and The Zone of Interest.

That slow-creep of causality seeps into the filmmaking elsewhere - which is to say Evil's achievement isn't solely one of words. Hamaguchi's clean, crisp, uncluttered frames both inspire mystery and invite development - even despoilment - of some variety; these images of contemporary Japan, familiar yet not necessarily aspirational, commonplace in most senses, look vulnerable to compromise or worse. Extended takes allow events to play out as they will, and for us to observe those compromises - and the fightbacks they inspire - in recognisable real time. And Hamaguchi does something very unsettling with his soundtrack, repeatedly switching off Eiko Ishibashi's gorgeous, lulling score with a sudden cut, lest we get too comfortable with what we're witnessing: the notes get snatched away, as trees and people sometimes do. All that noted, I think it would be inaccurate to describe Hamaguchi as a radical new voice in cinema. He still strikes me as broadly traditionalist in his methods, telling stories in a naturalistic key that, in turn, facilitates a clarity and coherence so often lacking in the corporate mainstream. (For Playmode, read Marvel, DC and those other recent polluters of the pop-cultural well.) His fortune is to have come along at the exact right moment for this kind of filmmaking to have the greatest impact - and we're still in that grace period where a creative is revealing himself without repeating himself. Drive My Car suggested Hamaguchi could travel anywhere, and find stories within stories; Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy set him down as a poet of the city. This Hamaguchi, by contrast, appears a nature boy, yet as Evil's jolting final movement proves, he's no pushover, either. Evil Does Not Exist represents Ryusuke Hamaguchi's really wild show: I would urge you to watch it, but also to mind how you go.

Evil Does Not Exist opens today in selected cinemas.