Evil Does Not Exist review: Ryusuke Hamaguchi turns down the volume to more aggressively embrace the oblique

Even after The Zone of Interest, the nomination of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car for the best-picture Oscar, though welcome, remains a contender for the least likely ever in that award’s history. Jonathan Glazer’s film dealt with a theme much chewed over during awards season. Almost nobody, at the Japanese film’s Cannes premiere, felt the academy would shortlist a 179-minute drama hanging round a production of Uncle Vanya.

Hamaguchi’s response to that unexpected prominence is to further turn down the volume and to more aggressively embrace the oblique. The core plot conflict in Evil Does Not Exist could form the basis of an achingly worthy ecodrama (the sort of thing that we do expect to interest the Oscars). An idyllic rural community is troubled on hearing that some sinister firm is set to build a glamping site nearby that may poison the water. The locals come together for a meeting with PR people from the company. So far so movie of the week.

One reading of the title allows the argument that, though wretched events may happen, individuals themselves are not infected with an independent wickedness. But even this contention is too simplistic for bookends that edge into the abstract. We open with a fluvial tracking shot, scored by seductive variations from Eiko Ishibashi, that glides us beneath a roof of stark, brumal tree tops. The music stops suddenly, casting us into something like reality. The last act teases and tests conventional expectations as it circles an obscure tragedy. There is, perhaps, no puzzle here to be solved. Just an enigma to be frowned at.

In the middle of all that, Hamaguchi has a reasonably lucid story to tell. Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) lives in apparent rural harmony with his eight-year-old daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa). There is a great deal of wood chopping. Wasabi is gathered. We are given to understand that the pure spring water is a vital ingredient for the nearby noodle restaurant. An agreeable place to live. But there are hints of looming concern. We hear gunshots in the distance. The apparently caring Takumi forgets to pick up his child from school.

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The decision to make a glamping site of the invading project – with all its implications of urban snoots faking rustic accommodation – is, perhaps, a little on the nose for such an otherwise subtle project, but the surrounding human interest soon takes over. Playmode, the Tokyo-based development firm, dispatches Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani), two uncommitted PR wonks who singularly fail to deal with suggestions that the site’s septic tank will poison the local stream. They are further flummoxed by worries about forest fires and practically throw up hands when suggestions are made that Playmode is principally in search of pandemic subsidies. We are in a more slippery, more cunningly bureaucratic place than the townspeople encounter in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, but memories of that play nonetheless resurface. The meeting is a masterpiece of awkwardness.

Takahashi and Mayuzumi are, however, not “evil” people. They are not the bandits attacking the good folk in Seven Samurai. Later on, during a car journey back to the site with a compromise offer, they reveal sympathy for the villagers and doubts about their own dubious positions as grifters for corporate baloney. Takahashi eventually makes feeble, if sincere, efforts to learn about Takumi’s life (though his efforts to chop logs would shame even Frasier Crane).

What we have here is a humanist matrix that spins calculations in good and ill from all sides. And then it is something else. The film looks to be heading to a place of reassuring compromise when it dramatically veers into something tonally and emotionally distinct. Some may argue that they’ve sat through two films: a formal feature and a more radical, bifurcated short. Both work. Do they fit together? It is, perhaps, too early to tell. Hamaguchi’s films take time.

Evil Does Not Exist is in cinemas from Friday, April 5th