Movie for the evening/Evil Does Not Exist (2024)
"Evil Does Not Exist" (2024), 18+ November 1, 2025  Winter. A quiet mountain village, snow-covered trees, the air painfully clear. A man walks along a path with his daughter, carrying a gas can, listening to the snow crunch underfoot. Everything seems peaceful, but behind this silence hides a menacing anxiety. So begins "Evil Does Not Exist"—a philosophical drama by Ryusuke Hamaguchi in which evil is not embodied in people, but dissolves into nature, time, and indifference. The protagonist is Takashi, a quiet forester who lives with his young daughter, Hana, in a tiny Japanese village. Their life is measured: chopping firewood, collecting water from a mountain spring, gazing at the stars. But one day, representatives of a large company arrive in the village, wanting to build a tourist glamping site nearby—a vacation spot for the city's wealthy. They promise jobs, development, prosperity. But for Takashi and his neighbors, this means the death of their world. Hamaguchi films the conflict not as a social battle, but as a clash of breaths. The city speaks loudly, nature whispers. And the further the conversation turns to construction, the clearer the feeling becomes: it's not interests that clash here, but philosophies. People who live in harmony and people who live for profit. The film moves slowly, like snow falling on branches. This slowness radiates tension. Each scene seems filled with an invisible force, as if the earth itself were watching the work of its children. The music is minimal, dialogue is sparse, but when Takashi looks up to the sky, the viewer feels the answer has already been given, but the man simply doesn't want to hear it. By the end, the film becomes a mystery. What really happened—a catastrophe or a purification? Hamaguchi leaves everything in a half-tone. Because evil doesn't exist—there are only the consequences of indifference, which grows like rust until it becomes part of the world. "Evil Does Not Exist" is neither a drama nor a parable. It is the breath of the planet, frozen in the frame. A film in which silence is louder than a gunshot, and snow is purer than any moral. |