{"id":111229,"date":"2024-03-28T16:08:58","date_gmt":"2024-03-28T15:08:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/?guid=288b9ea48d1bf97f9867c790b1b9148c"},"modified":"2024-03-28T16:08:58","modified_gmt":"2024-03-28T15:08:58","slug":"evil-does-not-exist-review-beautifully-precise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2024\/03\/28\/evil-does-not-exist-review-beautifully-precise\/","title":{"rendered":"Evil Does Not Exist review \u2013 beautifully precise"},"content":{"rendered":"
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R<\/span>yusuke Hamaguchi\u2019s Evil Does Not Exist opens beneath a canopy of trees, stripped bare by winter. We glide forward with our gaze fixed upwards at their branches, grey and threadlike against the uniform light of the sky. In a returning collaboration with Hamaguchi after Drive My Car, composer Eiko Ishibashi\u2019s tremulous string score dislodges something tender within your chest, like a stone being knocked loose at the mouth of a river.<\/p>\n

We spend a lot of time looking. So does Hana, a young girl wearing a striped beanie and tiny, tiny yellow gloves (played by a preternaturally grounded Ryo Nishikawa). Her father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika of Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy<\/a>) is an unsmiling, quiet man who shares his daughter\u2019s observational gaze and carries out odd jobs here in Mizubiki Village, just two hours outside of Tokyo. Sometimes together, sometimes alone, this is what they see: Wild wasabi, sprouting unruly on the incline of a small hill. Clear mountain springs, rushing playfully over mossy stones. The skeleton of a fawn, felled by an unknown hunter. There will be only two gunshots heard in this film, and they are monumental.<\/p>\n

Evil Does Not Exist has something grand, almost proselytising about its title. So it\u2019s perhaps odd at first that Hamaguchi\u2019s beautifully precise film \u2013 so restrained and exacting that its denouement is nothing less than earth-shattering \u2013 is about glamping. Relative to the affecting beauty of this village and the easy ways its people and environment tangle together, it\u2019s an instinctively ugly concept. As we soon realise after the actors repeatedly form their lips around its clumsy syllables, \u2018glamping\u2019 is an ugly word, too: a mutt of urban capitalism, consuming things fundamentally incompatible with its digestive system.<\/p>\n

When two Tokyo talent agency representatives arrive in Mizubiki to brief its residents about a glamping site they\u2019re constructing as a company retreat, we realise why Hamaguchi spends so much time entreating us to quietly gaze at the landscape. Mizubiki\u2019s ecology is placed in the centre of the frame: a pheasant feather held up to the sunlight, an expanse of white snow gently marred by deer tracks. These compositions never feel like backdrops, but a way for the land to communicate with us through the camera \u2013 reorienting our time, attention, and subjectivity in relation to it. The film\u2019s characters sometimes look directly at us, like we take the place of the wild wasabi or the deer skull.<\/p>\n

So when the Tokyo lackeys arrive with an advertisement for the glamping project accompanied by some calming royalty-free track, it\u2019s grating. We\u2019re seeing the same trees, the same crystalline water; but as the stony faces of the villagers tell us, we couldn\u2019t be looking at things more differently. \u201cSo much doesn\u2019t make sense,\u201d a young man says when the floor is opened for questions, and it doesn\u2019t \u2013 Hamaguchi\u2019s film excavates exactly why it\u2019s so hard to make someone understand that \u201cwhat you do upstream will affect those living downstream\u201d. Uttered calmly during a riveting back-and-forth about the site\u2019s septic tank, this truism summates the philosophical clash at the film\u2019s heart \u2013 which in the director\u2019s always-deft hands, slips into the supernatural. Forensic calm is substituted by an implosive horror in the film\u2019s final minutes \u2013 one that cuts so swiftly you only see the blood after it\u2019s been drawn.<\/p>\n

So carefully and empathetically constructed \u2013 even towards its \u201cvillains\u201d \u2013 that it feels miles away from didacticism, this shapeshifting ecological tale becomes a yearning rumination on the alienations of modern life, and the quietly violent seams where things in this world are changing and dying rapidly while we lack the language to arrive at the same destination, no matter how much people say they\u2019re listening. The Tokyo agency proposes to erect the glamping site in the path of the deer trail. \u201cWhere would the deer go?\u201d Takumi asks quietly, something concealed in his question. \u201cSomewhere else, I guess,\u201d one of the reps replies. He forgets something Takumi explained earlier about injured deer: if they can’t run, they’ll fight back.<\/p>\n

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