Drive My Car director changes gear with this slow-building forest tale

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST ★★★½
PG, 106 minutes

Far less of a crowd-pleaser than his surprise 2021 Oscar nominee Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist is a journey into the woods: the deeper you get, the less certain you’re liable to be about what kind of story you’re dealing with.

Is this a gently satirical comedy of urban and rural manners? A slow-building thriller, with a touch of surrealism in the manner of David Lynch? An eco-philosophical fable? What’s the moral?

Whatever else might be said, the film is a portrait of a place: the presumably fictional Japanese village of Mizibuki, surrounded by forest with mountains on the horizon, only a couple of hours’ drive from Tokyo but not yet a tourist hot spot (as we eventually learn, it’s only for the last couple of generations that the area has been settled at all).

The clear winter light lends the images a hyperreal sharpness: hard shadows, glittering footprints in the snow, a rippling pool of ice water reflecting tall, bare trees.

Occasional spots of bright colour tend to be associated with a human presence, like the yellow gloves worn by a young girl, Hana (Ryo Nishiwara), as she clings to the back of her father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), the film’s central character and biggest riddle.

A stolid type who rarely wastes words or removes his blue beanie, Takumi by his own account is the town’s odd job man, responsible for tasks such as chopping wood and fetching water – chronicled by Hamaguchi in lengthy, seemingly uninflected wide shots, not far from some of the interludes in Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return.

Yet, Takumi’s status in the community is more central than this might suggest, as we learn in a still lengthier scene that occupies much of the film’s first half, centred on a meeting set up by a couple of hapless talent agency reps (Ryuji Kosaka and Ayaka Shibutani) who have the thankless task of liaising with the townsfolk about a “glamping” site planned for the area.