Drive My Car won him an Oscar. Now he’s tackling the battle between nature and capitalism

The final scene in Evil Does Not Exist, the new film from the feted Japanese director of Drive My Car, comes as a shock. Two people in a vast field somewhere outside Tokyo experience sudden, extreme violence in different ways, but it is not certain afterwards – as the camera pulls away into the dusk – whether either of them has died or is even seriously hurt. What is sure is that a rupture akin to a knife slashing the screen in two has just taken place; it is breathtaking, inexplicable and persists in the mind, prodding and poking, for days afterwards.

Why does violence erupt so unpredictably? What does it mean? It’s a mystery, said director Ryusuke Hamaguchi in a typically enigmatic interview with the New York Times. “In our world, there are things we just do not understand,” he said. “I think one of the goals of films is to distil the world so, if the story has no mystery to it, then I don’t think it’s a reflection of the world.” The question of whether what we see is actually evil – and, by extension, whether evil does exist – remains tantalisingly open.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is 45. His film career took off in fits and starts – he worked in the commercial film industry for some years but, as he said later, “to my superiors I was probably a bad worker” – until 2021, when he had a startling double triumph. Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a trio of stories loosely about lost love, won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Three months later in Cannes, his three-hour Chekhovian epic about bereavement, Drive My Car, won three awards; it was later nominated for four Oscars, winning the award as best international film. In the space of a year, Hamaguchi had become one of the world’s most important filmmakers.

In the aftermath of this torrent of success, Hamaguchi agreed to devise visuals to accompany a series of live performances by Eiko Ishibashi, who wrote the music for Drive My Car. Ishibashi works in a studio deep in the countryside. “I was trying to find a motif that would work very well with her music,” says Hamaguchi when we meet at the Venice Film Festival, where Evil Does Not Exist will also collect a major prize. “And I arrived at the movement that exists within nature. Then, when I thought about the length of the piece, I thought it would also be necessary to have humans involved.”

After he came out of graduate school in 2008, Hamaguchi started making documentaries. Looking for local stories and characters to integrate with his visuals for Ishibashi, he read about a dispute over a proposed tourist development that boiled into a battle between town and country – and, crucially, between big money and little livelihoods – at a town hall-style meeting. This moment of cultural clash became the basis for Evil Does Not Exist. “I thought there was something very universal there that you see in other parts of society, this idea of a sloppy plan that shouldn’t be pushed forward, but still is,” he says. “So through that, I ended up making a film that has these political factors.”

From the start, movement in nature – the sway and susurration of trees in the wind – dominates the imagery, underscored by Ishibashi’s lush orchestrations. Moving beneath the trees, not far removed from nature himself, is Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), a handyman who supplies his fellow villagers with firewood and bottles of spring water he collects in remote corners of their surrounding forest. Takumi is also a solo dad to eight-year-old Hana, who is just as much at home in the woods as he is. “They are in harmony with each other,” says Hamaguchi. “You almost feel you want this section to continue forever.”

Trouble comes to town, however, in the form of two sales people from Playmode, a talent agency that has pivoted its business during Covid to become a cowboy tourism developer. Without any warning or due process, the agency has bought up a large tract of forest and is about to build a glamping site. It convenes a last-minute public briefing, where the canny farmers immediately see that the project is so badly planned that the site’s sewage will inevitably contaminate the locals’ most precious resource: water.

Does Takumi, a man brimming with quiet fury, embody Hamaguchi’s own anger? “To an extent,” he says doubtfully. “Perhaps it’s bad of me even to say, regarding this issue, that it’s only to an extent. But I am not entirely sure whether I am angry at the subject itself, even though there are tones of anger within the film.” As he was making it, he says, he didn’t think of the film as political, despite the fact it is about the environment and the workings of capitalism. “These things are a part of our everyday actions,” he told the New York Times. “I don’t believe in approaching these themes as large, looming ideas, but rather as problems in our ordinary lives.”

This battle between nature and her enemies is fought in a world of words, which Hamaguchi – despite being a precise and exacting scriptwriter – seems to regard with suspicion. He certainly questioned the value of words in Drive My Car, centred on a multicultural production of Uncle Vanya in which all the actors speak their home languages. As an audience member, he told me at the time, “you would have to respond to what you were seeing and hearing, not necessarily to the words themselves. Language is important in its own way, but the way the voice leaves the body has a certain honesty to it. Your voice will not lie.”

In Evil Does Not Exist, it is the lies that rankle. Nature is wordless. The people from Playmode bring what Hamaguchi calls “city logic” with them, imposing a world of weasel words on to an environment that works on mutual understandings. Takumi says little in the course of a normal day, but he can straddle both. As Hamaguchi points out, he engages with the “persons of words” as a peer, even if he is not communicating well. “When we consider what kind of knowledge he has, and what kind of logic he operates on, where he stands ends up being kind of ambiguous,” says Hamaguchi. Words are the working material of chicanery.

So we are back to wondering about the existence of evil, which is now identified with betrayal. Of course, Ryusuke Hamaguchi is not in the business of giving exact answers; even his questions are largely implied. ”I think it is possible to say that evil does not exist in nature,” he says cautiously. “I think it’s possible to say these words, even though violence does exist within nature. For example, a tsunami can be very destructive, but not many people would call that evil.

“So the title is sort of true, in one element. But then, if we ask if there are evil people in the film, that is not necessarily the case.” Not necessarily, but nothing is certain. Anyone seems capable of evil, yet they all have their weaknesses and their reasons. Every human being, says Hamaguchi, is full of mystery. “So if a character is able to give that sense of mystery, that’s when the character no longer feels unreal. They start to really exist. That, to me, is the core of working with fiction.”

Evil Does Not Exist opens in cinemas on Thursday.

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