We live based on fragile balances that are easily broken, and when they are broken, they can only give way to the sight of our decadent inertia.

After winning the Oscar and BAFTA for Best International Film with Drive My Car (2021), Ryüsuke Hamaguchi returned to the big screen with a drama of a deeper and more disturbing calibre: Evil Does Not Exist (2023).

Both films share elements typical of the director’s language. Nature serves as an improvised, although meticulously calculated, setting, captured in long sequence shots in which the viewer comes face to face with it as if it were just another character in the plot.

If in Drive My Car the ‘excuse’ was travelling by car, in Evil Does Not Exist Hamaguchi takes the perspective of domestic life in a rural village in Japan.

With both films, Hamaguchi explores the human from a particular and not at all superficial perspective and exposes it to an environment to which he gives the capacity to be more than a mere passive witness.

 

Nature

In his latest films, the Japanese director has accustomed us to considering the natural environment as a characteristic element of his cinema. In Drive My Car, the landscape turned out to be a more friendly element, although that was also determined by the tone of the film. A more everyday life drama with which it was easier to identify.

In the case of Evil Does Not Exist, everything is rawer. In addition to characters who live in more particular and alien realities, nature is also portrayed as more rugged. The soundtrack conveys the feeling that something bad is going to happen at any moment.

 

The curious thing about both cases is the way in which Hamaguchi captures beauty with its particularity. If the sequence shots in Drive My Car captured that nature that approaches the urban to the point of touching it, and perhaps the one we are most familiar with, in the 2023 film we are drawn to that immensity that is creation, to that beauty that paralyses us and takes our breath away to the point of frightening us by making us aware of our smallness.

'Evil Does Not Exist' deals with the concept of theodicy, of evil

“When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?” (Psalm 8:4)

It is always poetic to observe creation. And to do so through the lens of cinema, as a protagonist who has slipped into the script of the film and before whom the gaze can only humble itself.

Creation as a scenario that serves, in a realistic way, to collect all our stories: those we imagine, and also those we live.

Even when the very purpose of contemplation is not adoration, as in Hamaguchi’s films, there is an irreproachable breath of life in the glorification of that old Eden that was bequeathed to us.

 

Evil

However, Evil Does Not Exist deals with something that in Drive My Car was much more implicit and subtle. And it is precisely that concept of theodicy, of evil.

We live based on fragile balances that are easily broken, and when they break, they can only give way to the sight of our decadent inertia

Hamaguchi presents it in a rather aseptic way. Even when at one point in the film it seems that ‘evil’ is going to be personified in the figure of the representatives of a property development company that wants to ‘invade’ the rural ‘sanctuary’ of the homesteaders, Hamaguchi approaches the experience of these same characters to strip them of all prejudice. They are also human.

The problem is the naivety with which he approaches the key concepts of his story: humanity, nature and evil. Humanity seems to be reduced to being a victim of its circumstances, when in reality it is proactive in those circumstances.

Nature is a kind of agent, present and static, perfect in its behaviour and not to be interrupted or hindered in any of its ‘sovereign judgements’; this even includes the way in which it can threaten life. And it is in these circumstances that one can really consider whether evil exists, or whether it is only an accumulation of poorly understood humanities and actions of a nature that we cannot judge.

 

The portrait that Hamaguchi paints is brutal: we must follow the course of things, including nature itself, without interrupting them, because that is how we have lived and how we will live.

But this, as well as being naive, transports us to a painful existence, in which the only way to avoid living more ‘badly’ seems to be to simply die and let go.

We live based on fragile balances that are easily broken, and when they break, they can only give way to the sight of our decadent inertia. “I was senseless and ignorant; I was a brute beast before you” (Psalm 73:22).

The Bible teaches us that we all, including nature, need the intervention of an external agent, God incarnate, to reverse this decadent inertia and turn it into a path to salvation.

Precisely because evil and sin do exist, they harm us in all aspects of our being, to the point of depriving us of life itself.

Jonatan Soriano, journalist, theologian and evangelical pastor in Barcelona.