Oscar season is a marathon whether you win or lose. Ryuske Hamaguchi was lucky enough to be on the winning end when “Drive My Car” won the International Film Oscar two years ago. In so doing, the filmmaker became just the fifth Japanese director to win the honor and the first since Yōjirō Takita triumphed in 2009 for “Departures.” It also became the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture, a landmark achievement for a nation with a legacy of auteur filmmakers. For his follow-up, “Evil Does Not Exist,” Hamaguchi went in a much different direction.
“Evil” finds Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a local handyman (for lack of a better term), raising his inherently curious young daughter in a small village in the Japanese countryside. The residents get their water from the local spring and are respectful of the wildlife in the nearby woods. When a “glamping” company sends a marketing team to present plans to set up a new business near the stream, they receive a tremendous amount of pushback from the locals over environmental concerns. Two of the employees, Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), are then instructed to befriend Takumi, who is well respected in the community, and potentially hire him as a consultant to win over the village.
Lyrical and haunting with a beautiful score by Eiko Ishibashi (more on that in a moment), the film is purposefully not as narratively straightforward as “Drive My Car.” Speaking to Hamaguchi through a translator last week, The Playlist asked the filmmaker if he went in this direction to avoid potential comparisons to his last picture. And, perhaps, the exhaustion of another long awards campaign.*
“I do think there is a possibility that that is the case, but at the same time, this is something that happens to me every time I make a film,” Hamaguchi says. “Somebody always comes up to me and says, ‘Your next film is what’s important.’ And I’m always like, ‘Oh, please don’t say this to me.’ Each time that I hear this, of course, I’m very grateful for how ‘Drive My Car’ was, but at the same time, ‘Drive My Car’ was released just around the same time as ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.’ That actually resulted in me needing to promote these two films all over the world during COVID-19 for a very long time. And that actually did result in a lot of fatigue on my part to have to do this. Of course, while I was very grateful, I still needed to do this work of promoting physically unsafe environments given COVID. And so I think there was also a sense of me wanting to recover from that.”
*It should be noted that “Evil” is almost as critically acclaimed as its predecessor and likely a frontrunner as Japan’s submission for the 2025 International Film Oscar.
An original screenplay, Hamaguchi says he was inspired to craft “Evil” after Ishibashi asked him to create visual images to accompany her new music. In so doing, “Gift,” a 30-minute version of the project without dialogue, is also accompanying Ishibashi on her current world tour.
“When she first requested that of me, I wasn’t sure what she was necessarily looking for, whether she was maybe looking for abstract images to be projected behind her, as you might see in a lot of life performances,” Hamaguchi recalls. “And so, whilst not quite knowing what was expected of me, we had a lot of exchanges over email, and I realized that she very much trusted in what I do and that something good could come out of it. And so, with that trust, I decided to embark on this. And in doing so, I was constantly thinking about how what I make can harmonize well with her music. And so in thinking about that, I also reflected upon my collaboration with her in the past as well, as well as any music that she had already made in advance.”
The movie’s environmental storyline is a central theme of the project, but many will be surprised to learn that Hamaguchi says it wasn’t something he was consciously thinking of when he began formulating the script. Instead, the film’s storyline was inspired by the wildlife outside the windows of Ishibashi’s own music studio.
“The natural elements really came to me in thinking about how to make something that can harmonize with Eiko’s music,” Hamaguchi says. “But the nature that you, in fact, see in the film is the natural landscapes that exist outside of the music studio that she works in as well as where she lives. And I figured that that environment must, in fact, influence her work. But that all said, I figured that just depicting and capturing natural landscapes wouldn’t result in an interesting film, or at least it would be very different from the kinds of films that I have been making. And so I figured I needed to somehow intertwine human activity within these natural landscapes.”
It also turns out that a real-life event inspired the glamping incident in the movie. A conflict that Hamaguchi thought would be seen as a contemporary and universal issue in many parts of the world. The film, however, takes that scenario and twists it in a decidedly different direction.
“What I know about what resulted from the actual glamping discussion that occurred is that the company never came back to do more talk calls again and do these explaining sessions again,” Hamaguchi clarifies. “But I wouldn’t necessarily say that the citizens or the people there won because they weren’t exactly completely against it. And I think that’s actually also true in the film. They were more cooperative if the plan was something that was actually viable and something that could infect help the place or the people there. But because the plan that was actually described ended up being such a bad plan, I think ultimately what that resulted in is for the company to sort of self-destruct on its own idea.”
The movie’s ending can be interpreted in many ways, and audiences often have questions regarding the fate of the characters afterward that we won’t spoil here. That being said, we had to ask Hamaguchi if it was appropriate to categorize the film as a tragedy. And, in keeping with a somewhat vague ending the filmmaker has said he genuinely enjoys, he left the door open to multiple interpretations.
“I think I have to say that I don’t necessarily think it was a tragedy,” Hamaguchi says. “Of course, a terrible thing is happening, but I feel like I was working with a different kind of motivation. And, rather than just laying out the facts of this is what it is, that was sort of the stance that I took in depicting this moment. Almost as if it was just what is inevitable, but perhaps that in itself is what tragedy is.”
“Evil Does Not Exit” is now playing in limited release