After causing quite a sensation on the film festival circuit last year—it picked up the Grand Jury Prize and the FIPRESCI Award at the 2023 Venice Film Festival and was awarded Best Film at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival—Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Evil Does Not Exist is finally coming to streaming, following a special livestream event tonight on the Criterion Channel.
Populated by a cast of non-professional actors, the Japanese drama centers on a widower named Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) who lives with his eight-year-old daughter Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) in the Japanese mountain village of Mizubiki. "Yet this peaceful existence is threatened when a pair of corporate reps (Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani) arrive to launch a glamping site, sparking resistance from community members who fear the project’s potentially pernicious impact on the environment," reads the film's Criterion Channel synopsis. "When Takumi—a respected local figure—is offered the conciliatory role of site caretaker, it becomes unclear where his loyalties lie."
"A haunting, suspenseful meditation on humankind’s thorny relationship with nature, consumerism, and itself," Evil Does Not Exist is the much-anticipated follow-up to Hamaguchi's instant classic Drive My Car, which won the 2021 Oscar for Best International Feature Film. And, per Indiewire, you can now tune into the film on Sunday, September 22 at 8pm Eastern Time via a special livestreaming event on the Criterion Channel website or app. (If you're not yet a subscriber, Criterion is running a fall special, offering 20-percent off new annual subscriptions with the code "FALL20" through September 30.) Following the livestream premiere, the Criterion Channel will be the exclusive streaming home of Evil Does Not Exist starting on Tuesday, October 1.
Tonight's Criterion Channel premiere of Evil Does Not Exist is the latest livestreaming event from the channel, with recent arthouse titles including Ryuichi Sakamoto: Opus and The Beast. The livestream premieres further give a spotlight to critically acclaimed though less mainstream films and continues to differentiate the Criterion Channel as a cinephilic staple compared to more populist competitor platforms like Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, Max and Paramount Plus.
Check out the official trailer for Evil Does Not Exist above before tuning in to the drama's streaming premiere tonight on the Criterion Channel website or app.
