Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, May 3, 2024)

His first film since Drive My Car. Maybe the best new filmmaker of the last ten years.

 

Shit I still need to see Drive My Car

 

Going to try and catch this on the weekedn if it stops raining

 

Saw this last month, it's a perplexing, fascinating film, that pulls the rug out from under you in ways you wouldn't expect. It hints that it'll move to one direction, and then takes a sideways tack. Some really wonderful long takes, and beautiful shots out in nature too.

Interested to hear other people's thoughts once they get to it, but it's a bit of a head scratcher!

 

Saw this on the weekend with my brother, the weather cleared up breifly so I only got wet on the way home.

This was my take on the ending

key moments (quoted from memory)

• In the meeting the village cheif says "the people at the top of the stream must be responisble for what happens at the bottom of the stream"

• The shot of Takumis black & white family photo with his wife who is no longer around, assumed dead.

• The car discussion on deer. "wild deer will generally not attack unless they have been shot before/wouned or are the children of deer who were shot."

In the scene where they find Hana and the deer my brother pointed out the time of day switches back to day light when they had just been searching in the dark(EDIT: HE WAS WRONG). This scene is a combination of the 2 time lines. Hana taking off her hat and getting killed by the deer during the day, and later Takumi finding her body, realising she is dead and attacking Takahashi.

Takumi is a wild deer wounded by the death of his wife, attacked again with the death of his daughter he reacts violently Killing takahashi.
Here Takahashi is an embodiment of upstream events.

• "it might be good for city people to come and learn about nature"
  "Its not safe for city folk to interact with the deer, they will contract diseases"

• "If you build a fence where will the deer go?"
  "Somewhere else."

Takahashi can also be viewed as water poisned by upstream events. Mordernity has left him distatisfied with his personal and professional life looking for something else. A wild deer pushed into a new environment Takahashi died becasue it was not safe for him to interact with Takumi.

Hana, Takahashi, the water, the deer are all victims to the cause and effect relationships of their ecosystems. That is not evil that is nature. Nature is a heavy focus of the dialogue and the camera through out, that we are apart of it, we effect it and it effects us. The final scene we see Takahashi recover from being choked to instead succumb to the elements as the camera mirrors the opening shot of the trees this time at night. Nature continues its path.

 

It opens about an hour and a half from here next weekend. I will be making the pilgrimage then.

 

Hope you will blessed with good weather on your travels

Stay away from my comment till you get back

 

hyped to see this

I enjoyed Drive My Car a fair amount, definitely not at the level where I'd call him the best filmmaker of the last decade.

 

I loved it until the ending, which I need to think about for at least a day or two.

 

The ending makes sense in the comparison between a deer protecting its young and the handyman protecting his way of life, but the latter half of the movie had been about the talent agent being skeptical about the company plans and wanting to stay there and become one with the town. If that had not been in the movie the murder makes more narrative sense, but violence is not always, or even usually, carried out rationally.

 

The agent connects the storys
Its showing us movement caused by upstream events, the girl explores the wilderness because the her dad isnt there, the agent is looking for something else after becoming with dissatisfied with modernity, the town in context to is a recent settlement started for farming after the war, the deer will have to go somewhere else because of the development. The violence is reactive and intinctual, it is a downstream effect for those at the bottom of the stream.

In the meeting the elder says the people at the top of the stream need to act responsibly but the boss dismisses all of that, we learn that the agent is not at top of the stream and then all the down streamers take hits.

 

https://boxd.it/7sXIyn

wrote a little on the box. I loved this.