Following the release of 2021's Drive My Car, the Oscar-winning drama that cemented Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's as one of Japan's most internationally acclaimed auteurs, the filmmaker had to switch lanes. "I thought I had put out everything that I could in that moment," Hamaguchi says.
Ultimately, he needed to make something completely different: Evil Does Not Exist, a bucolic ecopolitical thriller about the residents of a rural Japanese village, whose shared way of life is about to be disrupted by the construction of a glamping site. "What I was looking for was a way to spotlight the connection between humanity and nature," Hamaguchi explains.
The film was born from his collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi, the Japanese singer-songwriter who composed the score for Drive My Car. Ishibashi requested that he shoot visuals to play as part of her live performances; Hamaguchi made a feature film. "Her music is so beautiful that I think listening to it opens the audience up more, because they just want to keep listening to it," says the director. "It makes them more sensitive to the film as a whole and more likely to notice certain things about the environments and images they're seeing. Things that might seem abstract become much more alive and tangible."
Their collaboration has resulted in two projects: Gift, the shorter, silent version of the film that accompanies Ishibashi's live performances, and Evil Does Not Exist, which took home the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize and FIPRESCI Prize at last year's Venice International Film Festival. At one point, Hamaguchi considered not releasing his movie at all.
"I had conceived of the movie as an original narrative work that would be adapted into the visual piece now known as Gift. I wasn't planning on theatrically releasing it as a standalone film," he admits. "Once we started shooting it and I heard the voices of the actors in it, though, I thought it would really be a shame if people didn't get to hear their voices too. So, after we were done shooting, I approached Eiko and asked for permission to complete the film as its own thing."
Below, Hamaguchi shares with A.frame the five films that had the biggest influence on Evil Does Not Exist.
Written and Directed by: Claire Denis
There are so many films by Claire Denis that I really like, but I love I Can't Sleep in particular. There's something about the film that really captures the atmosphere of the '90s. Things were supposedly more stable back then, but because of that stability, the unsettling feelings of daily life really started to become more apparent.
I think Claire's films have a very mysterious touch to them. They always feel like they've taken John Cassavetes characters and put them inside genre movies. The stories they tell are all told within a very filmic structure that feels very genre-specific, and yet her characters aren't treated like they're in genre films. Those aspects of her filmmaking really influenced Evil Does Not Exist.
Directed by: Kelly Reichardt | Written by: Jonathan Raymond
I really like all of Kelly Reichardt's films as well, but Meek's Cutoff stands out to me because it's a Western that is done in a very contemporary way. It's definitely reminiscent of the great movie Westerns of old, but they feel more like spiritual references for Meek's Cutoff than filmic ones. As a filmmaker, I think Kelly is just brilliant at finding the right endings for her films. By ending them where she does, she ensures that something always grows within the audience. The feelings caused by her endings end up rooting themselves in people's hearts, and that's something I really wanted to try to do with Evil Does Not Exist.
Written and Directed by: Víctor Erice
I always mention Víctor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive in relation to Evil Does Not Exist. In fact, much to my embarrassment, there are some specific shots in the film where I'm very much copying The Spirit of the Beehive, so I always have to bring that movie up. But I also want to mention El Sur, because it's a film I very much love and it really highlights the broken relationship between a father and his daughter — even more so than The Spirit of the Beehive. That's very much present in El Sur, and I think some of the essence of that film is in Evil Does Not Exist.
Directed by: Hou Hsiao-hsien | Written by: Chu T'ien-wen and Wu Nien-jen
Specifically, I want to mention the camera positioning in that film and the distance that's created throughout between the camera and the people in front of it. When I think about certain filmmakers, like Robert Bresson for example, I think about how he captures the subject at hand and the concentration that his movies have. In comparison, Hou Hsiao-hsien has a very different kind of concentration. There's a wideness to his vision, in the sense that his films observe both the environment and the person at the same time. That was something I hoped to do as well, to create this breadth of vision that feels both concentrated and observational.
Directed by: Kiyoshi Kurosawa | Written by: Hiroshi Takahashi
I'm talking about the original 1998 version. Kurosawa is, of course, my teacher and mentor, so he's been a big influence on me all along. However, rewatching Serpent's Path, in particular, was almost a spiritually supportive experience for me, because it reminded me that in the past — especially in the '90s — many films like it and Evil Does Not Exist were being made. Serpent's Path almost leaves the audience behind and leaves us unsure of what to make of its ending.
Kurosawa put out a lot of masterpieces in that period, including Cure. But I think Serpent's Path isn't quite as internationally recognized as Cure yet. It's a film in which one could say that evil does, in fact, exist, and the atmosphere of my film was very much influenced by the mood of Serpent's Path.
I would also mention another one of Kurosawa's films, Eyes of the Spider, as an influence on Evil Does Not Exist, both in terms of the camera positioning throughout it and the way that it ends. I hope more movies like it start to get made again.
