If a few years ago, Ryusuke Hamaguchi could only be regarded as the favorite of a small number of fans, then now he can be said to be the leader of the new generation of Japanese film directors.
In 2022, he won the Oscar for Best International Film with "Drive My Car", and he officially came out of the circle in China.
And he continued to make efforts, and another new film shined at last year's Venice Film Festival, and won the Grand Jury Prize in one fell swoop.
At this year's Beijing Film Festival, this new film is hard to find.
After the streaming media was launched, it also had mixed reviews of the film, which made the audience on the whole network noisy.
Let's talk about it today -
Evil does not exist
Evil Does Not Exist (2023)
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Screenwriter: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Starring: Hitoshi Omi / Rei Nishikawa / Ryuji Kosaka / Kaoru Kakutani
Genre: Drama
Release: 2023-09-04 (Venice Film Festival)
Runtime: 106 minutes
*Warning: This article contains spoilers
At the beginning of the film, the camera slowly moves from the bottom to the top looking up at the canopy, and it is still the familiar sound in Hamaguchi's film that precedes.
4 minutes of long shots, comfortable and quiet. The background music crescendos, and a sense of crisis ensues.
After a long look up, I can't help but wonder, who is watching the sky?
A fawn-like girl appeared in the woods, looked up at the canopy, and then turned and hid deep into the forest.
The sound of chainsaw logging shatters the silence, and on the outskirts of Tokyo, this mountain forest is secluded by a small group of residents who live an ordinary and laid-back life.
Sawing wood is the male protagonist Qiao (played by Omi Kajun), who runs a local convenience house and is also quite famous among the residents.
He chops wood and goes to the river to fetch water, and the surrounding residents believe that the local soba noodles are so delicious thanks to the naturally sweet mountain spring water.
In addition to these farm jobs, he also needs to pick up his daughter Hua (played by Nishikawa Ling) from school every day, completely detached from the nature of urbanization and compact time, and he often forgets the time. But as long as he searched in the woods, he always found his daughter.
In the quiet of the mountains, there are occasional distant gunshots, and the trees are inadvertently found with dry corpses, which are the bones of deer that also live in the mountains, always reminding hunters that they will wander in the mountains.
Next to Tokyo, this rare natural scenery was quickly sniffed out by a group of capitalists for business opportunities.
In the three years of the epidemic, people in the city were overwhelmed by illness and work, and camping has become the best choice for countless urbanites to escape the hustle and bustle of the big city.
A developer approached the door and bought a piece of land in the mountains to turn it into a glamping base.
It was necessary to seek the consent of local residents, and the company sent two salesmen, Takahashi (played by Ryushi Kosaka) and Xiao Dai (played by Saiyu Shibuya), to the mountains and held a project introduction meeting. Akari is talking about asking for opinions, but in fact it is just going through the motions.
Takahashi is touting that the campsite can be a win-win situation, that it can generate revenue for local residents, and that people in the city can also experience the beauty of nature. You can even turn the one-of-a-kind mountain spring water soba into an internet celebrity delicacy.
But the residents were not so easy to fool, and the briefing could be said to be a needle-to-needle, with both sides insisting on their own words, and the villagers were also full of distrust of the business plan.
Commercial intervention inevitably brings a lot of pollution, first and foremost this unique water quality.
It was found that the sewage treatment shown in the design drawings would be discharged directly into the downstream well water, and the villagers' lives and drinking water would be contaminated.
Another grandmother questioned the potential for fire.
Camping is a must-have barbecue over an open fire, as the weather is dry and windy, which can easily cause wildfires.
Takahashi, on the other hand, said that they only allow tourists to barbecue in designated areas during the day, and that they are supervised by special personnel.
What about the staff off work that night? Will the young men honestly not go to the barbecue at night?
Grandma's questioning left Takahashi speechless, after all, the developer just wanted to save labor costs for night shifts.
The seemingly meticulous camping plan is actually full of loopholes, because they are not strictly a developer at all.
Before the epidemic, they were still an entertainment company, and the staff Takahashi was still an agent.
However, the economic downturn brought about by the epidemic has left the company desperate, and in addition to the economic income that this project can bring, the most important thing is that it can get a large amount of government subsidies for the epidemic.
Gao Qiao and Xiao Dai, who had talked to the villagers, actually felt that there was a big loophole in the plan, but the superiors said that the land had been bought, and the subsidy was two months' income for the company.
As for the so-called water pollution, the "experts" in the video conference said that there will be pollution wherever it is put anyway, so it is better to keep the original plan and save a new design fee.
As for the problem of wildfires, it is better to call Qiaolai, who has a high reputation in the local area, to be the administrator, which can not only save money, but also alleviate local conflicts.
Takahashi and Dai were disappointed with the project, and they returned to the mountain village to discuss with Qiao about hiring a ranger.
They immersed themselves in nature, felt the agility of nature, tasted the unique taste of soba noodles with mountain spring water, and helped the owner of the noodle restaurant to fetch water from the mountain stream.
After fetching water, Kazuki Takahashi stood next to the car and smoked, when suddenly a "boom" gunfire broke the silence.
Takahashi keenly recognized the sound of a gun, and they quickly realized that it was a deer hunter.
On the way back, it is said that the deer here usually do not attack people at will, but if they are hit, the deer that are dead may fight back.
Takahashi also tried his hand at chopping wood, and in nature, he really felt this precious purity.
The three of them got along happily so much that Qiao once again forgot to pick up her daughter and walked home by herself, but this time she couldn't walk back by herself.
The flowers are missing.
The three of them immediately drove through the mountains and forests to look for them, and the villagers also used the radio to find people. The whole village went out, but they couldn't find the flowers all night.
The next day, at dawn, at the end of the mist, the figure of the flower appeared.
And in front of her, there stood a wild deer, a wild deer that had been shot and was about to die.
Takahashi keenly recalls Qiao's previous admonition that this dying deer is aggressive, and he wants to come forward to rescue Hana.
But the most dramatic scene appeared, instead of saving his daughter, Qiao jumped up and grabbed Takahashi and strangled Takahashi to death.
And by the time she came to her daughter Hua's side, Hua was already out of breath, and blood was slowly flowing from her nose.
Qiao picked up the corpse of the dead flower and disappeared into the mist.
Takahashi staggered to his feet, and he tried to struggle to leave, but he fell to the ground, and his life and death were unknown.
The long shot of looking up at the sky once again occupies the picture space, and the sky is about to be clear, and who is watching the sky?
A picture of natural tranquility, Ryusuke Hamaguchi shows us the rare creations of nature outside of the urban space.
The sudden sound of gunfire, the sudden blackening of Qiao, all the abrupt designs hint at evil.
The title of the film, "Evil does not exist", is a negation of the state of existence defined as "evil", and Hamaguchi wants to express more about the indefinable nature of "evil".
What is "evil"?
Among the developers who broke the tranquility, there are also those who cherish this precious nature;
In the so-called natural and innocent mountains and forests, there is also a crisis of wild animals;
And the group of aborigines who claim to defend the mountains and forests are not to protect nature, but to maintain their old order of existence......
"Evil" is not a single definition, and it may not be explicitly "existing" where we can see it, but it still "exists".
*The author of this article: Shallow