The winter sky in the opening shot of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist is a brilliant white, seen through a tangle of spindly tree branches. Set against a radiant orchestral score, the scene looks sublime. But then a dissonant note is heard in the music. Then another. Not everything is as it seems.
“I started from a place of not knowing anything,” Hamaguchi says of his new film, which sets up a paradisal image of nature to then unsettle it. He speaks with a humility that belies his standing as one of Japan’s most celebrated auteurs. It was late 2021, he recalls; his previous film, Drive My Car, had been released (and would soon be the surprise hit of awards season, walking away with the Oscar for best international feature film). The musician Eiko Ishibashi, who scored Drive My Car, asked the director if he could provide background visuals for her tour. Hamaguchi, a longtime city-dweller, visited her at her studio in the countryside. Inspiration struck as he listened to her music against the sweeping landscapes.
As well as a silent work, Gift, that plays at Ishibashi’s performances, Hamaguchi came away from that trip with the germ of an idea for Evil Does Not Exist. Speaking over video from Yokohama, joined by an interpreter, Hamaguchi says the film was almost an accident, something he didn’t “go about making”. Its title “naturally popped up in my head when I was looking at nature”, he says. It struck him then that while “there is violence within nature” – such as natural disasters – “that violence doesn’t necessarily make us think: ‘Oh that is evil.’” Although “when it comes to human society, it can be said that evil perhaps does exist”. So he started writing a script about the relationship between humanity and the natural world.
The story he ended up creating feels strikingly modern, touching on evergreen concerns of gentrification, conservation and the consequences of a culture that values profit above all else. Two young workers from Tokyo arrive at a village a few hours away, and host a public meeting about their plans to set up a new glamping site for tourists from the city. They have slick marketing materials, sizeable reserves of confidence, as well as a sense that it might be OK if the village’s water supply gets mixed with a bit of raw sewage. The residents disagree, instigating a slow-burning clash between city and country.
Drive My Car, an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami short story about an actor grieving his wife, was hailed as a masterpiece, and catapulted the director to a new level of international success. The film received four Oscar nominations and, along with its best international film win, was the first Japanese film to be nominated for best picture. With that, though, came new anxieties. “I did not know what to do next,” Hamaguchi recalls. Making this new film “was a way for me to release myself from the pressure”.
Perhaps the fear was unfounded. Evil Does Not Exist won the Grand Jury prize at the Venice film festival and best film at London film festival. Unlike Drive My Car, the film is relatively short – 106 minutes to Drive My Car’s three hours – and is pitched at a more enigmatic register, as it builds up to an ending that is surprisingly ambiguous given the film’s political themes.
“I often get asked about the message of this film,” Hamaguchi says before avoiding making a statement. “People have said that perhaps this is the most political film I’ve made, but I wasn’t really conscious of these things when I was making the film.” Politics is instead handled on a different register. “Even though words like ‘capitalism’ and ‘the environment’ seem like big problems, these things are a part of our everyday actions. I don’t believe in approaching these themes as large, looming ideas, but rather as problems in our ordinary lives.” As for the mysterious ending, he says “there’s no way for anybody to understand everything. In our world, there are things we just do not understand. I think one of the goals of films is to distill the world in a way, so if the story has no mystery to it, then I don’t think it’s a reflection of the world.”
The idea of mystery is a mainstay of Hamaguchi’s films, which tell quietly observant stories about intimacies forged and foreclosed between lovers, friends and strangers. He came on the global radar in 2015 with the acclaimed Happy Hour, a five-hour epic about middle-aged women navigating unhappy marriages. The 2018 romantic drama Asako I & II follows the aftermath of a ruptured affair between two young lovers, while 2021’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy – released around the same time as Drive My Car – is an anthology of three stories loosely about lost love. To an outsider, these might look like markers of a rocketing career: an early hit followed by a litany of well-received arthouse films, before reaching record-breaking global success. But Hamaguchi had been working in the industry years before that.
He had an itinerant childhood, moving around Japan every few years because of his father’s civil service job, and was a fan of manga and games, “the kinds of things I could enjoy wherever I was”. It wasn’t a particularly artistic childhood: “I would say up until my teenage years I had been thinking of life as quite boring. I didn’t necessarily have something terrible happen to me but I didn’t find it super fun, either.” Things started getting more interesting at university in Tokyo, where he joined a film club and started going to screenings across the city.
Success did not come immediately. When he graduated from university, a professor put him in touch with an alumnus who was a director in Japan’s commercial film industry (which makes films with a bigger budget and crew compared with the independent world) and Hamaguchi got a job as a junior assistant director. “Back then the industry was still working in their older ways. There was a sense that if you were bad at your job, you would be punished for being bad at your job” – and “to my superiors I was probably a bad worker”. Having learned that the commercial industry was not for him, he went to graduate school and found a mentor in the celebrated director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, before finding his feet making indie documentaries.
A longtime cinephile, Hamaguchi has professed admiration for classic Hollywood; Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and the Katharine Hepburn-Cary Grant romantic comedy Holiday count among his favourite films. Did Drive My Car’s US success stir any interest in working in that world? “I would say Hollywood today is very different from classic Hollywood,” he says. “I feel like I have no real understanding of how today’s Hollywood works.” Although he is personally curious about what some sets for the biggest budget films even look like, it “ultimately has to be the right opportunity”.
More immediately, he seems to have found the freedom he sought after releasing Drive My Car. “When I didn’t know what I wanted to do, it was important for me to go back to my basics,” he says. While the new film will raise a lot of questions, he’s characteristically keen to preserve the importance of the unknowable, for himself and for viewers. “The film does reflect a limit of my own understanding and thought,” he says, echoing something he said earlier in our conversation about the importance of mystery: “I think the world is full of mystery and absurdity. I don’t necessarily think I will find the answers while I’m alive, but it’s certainly a feeling that I have about living in this world.”
Evil Does Not Exist is out on 5 April.
