Japan, 2023
Directed by Hamaguchi Ryûsuke
With Omika Hitoshi (Takumi), Nishikawa Ryô (Hana), Shibutani Ayaka (Mayuzumi), Kosaka Ryûji (Takahashi)

This is the world of the forest. Tall and awesome, even in the dead of the winter, trees are everywhere, spreading to the horizon, surrounding you at every turn, keeping cities away from your mind. When you look up, tilt your head backward, lie on the ground, the sky becomes a richly and delicately ornamented strip, as the branches of the trees’ top of the trees trace as many thin and convoluted lines filling weirdly but gracefully the vast space painted in blue by a sunny weather. This beauty is captured by a camera tilted upwards and moving slowly straight ahead to make up the first images of the film, with the shots interspersed with the titles written soberly white on a black screen; in a poignant bookending move, it also featured, shot by night, in the last images, just before the editing switches abruptly to the end credits.
Quick and blunt is also the way this initial peripatetic long take ends, to let appear shot in a closeup a cute little girl in blue bringing back her head to a level, before a long shot shows her moving ahead: so it maybe the first images were her viewpoint. It is plausible they were a VOP shot and yet it could be something else.
The confident, carefree manner the girl walks through the forest finds an echo in the tranquil, efficient way a man cuts wood and then lights a cigarette near his house which is nestled among the trees. The air is so pure and the environment is so quiet that the click of his lighter can be heard clear and loud even at the long distance where the camera stands from him. It takes a couple of sequences to find out both are related but it is already plain that they feel comfortable living in the forest. Their link is revealed by a wonderful trick of the camera: the camera tracks sideways and at a distance to capture the lumberjack walking briskly in the forest looking for someone, but then loses tracks of him as it moves behind a heap of ground, and eventually catches up with him and shows him carrying on his shoulders the girl in blue. Both keep strolling around, the father, Takumi, teaching his daughter, Hana, trees’ names and characteristics. They look more than comfortable: they indeed strive to be in harmony with the forest.
Could it last? A meeting hastily convened in their small village north of the Japanese capital with two employees of a Tôkyô-based communication agency suggests it could not. Mayuzumi and Takahashi present to a puzzled audience a touristic project that is supposed to make this quaint corner of Japan richer by riding on the coattails of the glamping phenomenon. This ugly word is a portmanteau of “glamorous” and “camping” describing a style of camping in a variety of accommodations, not just your ordinary trailer and tent but also cabins and tree-houses, with amenities and even resort-style services that are definitively not associated with your regular camping. But setting up a glamping site is fraught with risks the villagers eagerly point out, baffling the two speakers who flounder to defend what looks like clearly an ill-advised project drafted only out of greed. A sequence in their Tôkyô offices proves later how much a rude and dismissive young villager was right in his criticism as it features an offhanded and contemptuous boss and a manipulative and cunning so-called expert. To their dismay, Mayuzumi and Takahashi are compelled to go back to the village to placate and in fact corrupt Takumi, who was one of the most articulate critics.
Their trip back to the village opens the film’s second part. During a long sequence the camera stays inside Takahashi’s car, set on the back seats, recording the long conversation giving the audience some insight on the backstory of both characters while hinting at their real dissatisfaction with their jobs and lives. Although Mayuzumi, who used to be a care worker, tends to put a brave face on her fate, Takahashi sounds washed-up and at a loss. They are not pleased with their assignment but he sounds even more peevish and actually wonders if the trip is not going to be an opportunity for him to reconsider his life. But the camera does not really shoot them as it can be expected, choosing remarkably to linger on the woman’s profile even when it is Takahashi who talks at length, as if listening was more important to observe than uttering words – during the meeting with the villagers, incidentally, it was Mayuzumi who paid the closer attention, said the most polite and soothing words, looked the more empathetic. As deeper feelings and truths get aired in this car, it seems director Hamaguchi Ryûsuke wants to emphasize the role of empathy, the very virtue needed to deal with the villagers need and the boss pathetically lacks.
Coming back for a second meeting: it was a promise made to the disgruntled villagers by Mayuzumi and Takahashi, but it is not really fulfilled, or rather fulfilled only in the petty interest of a capitalist venture (eager to cash in government subsidies). It is like a repetition inside the narrative and so would be another walk in the forest, the father again, as usual it seems, trying to catch up with his inquisitive daughter. But both events take swiftly a wholly unexpected turn: the second meeting is far more confused and quickly breaks the path for the rebellion of Takahashi while the second walk becomes soon ominous, then swerves the whole narrative into a tragic territory revolving around the loss of a child, before ushering in a magical and disturbing experience the characters would perhaps never recover from.
Actually, it is difficult to say but not only because the last images, mirroring the first, leave so much hangs in the air. The narrative is unquestionably inconclusive but in fact its climax is not even fully articulated. The camera does capture a stunning face-to-face between a wounded deer and Hana, an encounter that does not come fully as a surprise as a casual conversation between Takumi and his visitors talked about the deer living in the area (and whose habits risk getting disturbed by the glamping camp). But how it ends up is at the last minute ignored, the camera choosing instead to shoot a spat between Takumi and Takahashi: it is an accessory development, though highly symbolic, that gets the center stage while the seemingly more fascinating event is kept away from the audience’s gaze, the ultimate disrupting flourish of a film that has emphatically settled for abrupt cuts, caring little for smooth or logical transitions, and played spellbinding music pointedly cut short even before the visual action ends, an ending that by the way did not always was tantamount to a truly dramatic development (the very idea of the film was born out of a collaboration on another project between Hamaguchi and composer Ishibashi Eiko, who has created here a magnificently evocative and eerie soundtrack). The narration gets a disorienting and surreal quality, as if the narrative it handles required a real alteration of the more ordinary cinematic parameters.
The conflict about the glamping camp and the insistence of the harmony father and daughter experience in their lives and above all in the forest make it obvious to view “Aku wa sonzai shinai – Evil Does Not Exist” as an ecological fable highly critical of the current capitalism. City wealth, the city life it forces upon folks, and city-dwellers’ prejudices are slammed, more with a nicely wry touch rather than with a scathing satire, while the confrontation inside the gorgeous landscape highlights the genuine modesty and wisdom of the villagers and above all of the quiet and dignified Takumi. But Takumi’s daughter, through her self-sufficient demeanor and her keen and warm embrace of the wild, even if it means running real risks, stands as more enigmatic presence, an innocence that is dearly bonded to her father and yet more connected to another dimension of life than even a Takumi who has a deep, intimate, knowledge of the forest.
In the land worshiping the nature spirits known as kami and where folk tales and literature traded many tales about ghosts and monsters, Hana is an ideal character to go through a radical and tragic experience even as she is bearing witness to a beauty of the world that should be carefully left unsullied. The villagers were worried that their precious river could be tainted by the waste of the camp, hence their vocal opposition; Takahashi thought that Hana is threatened and takes too bold a step, hence his fistfight with Takumi who fears any meddling; either way, it is plain those from the distant city had to keep their hands off a wild they cannot understand but that folks more attuned to what the forest holds and means can handle with the respect, the awe, it inspires, even if it is terribly dangerous. Meanwhile, even as they are prompted to demonstrate empathy and to view the world so poetically shot Hamaguchi with fresh eyes, the audience is left unable to grab the full extent of the depicted world and compelled to imagine its deeper, darker dimension. Cinema can bring you far into the beauty of the world and the dignity of men but then goes only that far, delivering an unparalleled vision that still cannot embrace everything.