Something illusory lurks in the films of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Characters encounter each other under false and mistaken pretences; layers of performance mount and interact; memory intrudes and falters. In the Japanese director’s latest, an environmental fable that won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2023 Venice Film Festival, the ecosystem of a small village is threatened by a Tokyo business’s plan to establish a ‘glamping’ site in the region. The company is deceptive about its self-serving intentions, which can only disrupt the fabric of the residents’ lives. There is a careful balance to the environment, one that – through loops and ghostly motifs – seems to be at risk because of encroaching violence.

In a sweet early scene, single father Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) and his young daughter Hana (Ryô Nishikawa) walk through a forest in Harasawa, playing a game of tree identification. ‘Larches have black bark. Pine bark is red,’ Takumi advises. Hana memorises and repeats this information like a sacred guide. Despite a stern warning from the village chief, the eight year old is frequently observed wandering alone, collecting feathers, chasing birds, and following deer trails. There is mystery here, and the creatures’ habits and formations tempt the fringes of her world to suggest an elusive, intricate ecology. But there is also a sense of communion in how cinematographer Yoshio Kitagawa and Hamaguchi’s co-editor, Azusa Yamazaki, frame the characters’ encounters with the natural world. The distance between them and their surroundings is collapsed by sequences when the actors look directly into the lens, followed by an eyeline match of something in their environment, like wild wasabi or an animal carcass. The emphasis is on the relationship between living things – moments of meeting that can feel either confronting or playfully curious.

Hamaguchi’s characters are prone to speaking for long stretches in vulnerable, quasi-literary monologues, as was the case in Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and the Oscar-winning Drive My Car (both 2021). Something rises in the gaps between the spoken and the unspoken, and concealed desires can overwhelm polite conversation. Takumi is a much less talkative character, however. With a deep knowledge of his village, he does odd jobs for the other residents. Hamaguchi introduces the character through a series of absorbingly simple tasks, including chopping wood and collecting water from the local river. Takumi’s relationship to Hana is also complicated by his frequent absent-mindedness, which makes him somewhat neglectful; we get the impression of a deeper, nagging preoccupation (tied, potentially, to the absence of Hana’s mother) that the screenplay assuredly withholds.

Hiroyuki Miura as Kazuo (left) and Hitoshi Omika as Takumi (courtesy of Hi Gloss Entertainment)

Then there is the matter of the glamping. After establishing the textures and residents of Harasawa, we are introduced to two representatives: Takahashi (Ryûji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) from the intruding Tokyo business, a talent agency called Playmode, who are developing the lavish site to benefit from post-pandemic subsidies. The film presents bureaucratic systems and crooked business practices shrewdly, even slyly. The glamping trend and its relationship to the environment are inherently paradoxical, servicing patrons’ desires to be in nature while maintaining a distance from it provided by material luxury. In a community briefing scene that runs for close to twenty minutes, we hear all the necessary corporate buzzwords, played delightfully – almost furiously – straight by Kosaka. Tourism will invigorate the region, the residents are told, with half-hearted allusions to community relationships. Playmode’s ignorance is obvious: among other issues, the placement of the site’s septic tank will result in the contamination of the village’s river, which would be disastrous for residents living downstream.

Post-briefing, the film unexpectedly changes tack to follow Takahashi and Mayuzumi. Back at the Tokyo office, they begin to feel racked with regret over the project’s lack of foresight, yet are sent to the village once again to secure a community endorsement. A protracted roadtrip conversation follows, illuminating the pair’s particular form of urban alienation. This is an unusual plot change that makes their relationship to Takumi and Harasawa all the more fraught, and suggests Hamaguchi’s unwillingness to submit to an easy ‘us versus them’ narrative.

Throughout, Evil Does Not Exist maintains a brooding naturalism, even as it veers towards obscure dread. The film developed out of a musical collaboration between Hamaguchi and musician Eiko Ishibashi (who worked on Drive My Car), and the same recurring, mournful string piece imbues the story with an undercurrent of loss and rage. At times, the anguished score will abruptly halt, as though preparing the viewer for sudden, unforeseen shifts. Halfway through the film, everything in Hamaguchi’s frame begins to feel conspiratorial: there are hazy smoke signals and slow, drifting shots pointed upwards through the trees – an eerie, foreboding image that threads through the narrative.

The allure of Evil Does Not Exist is ultimately tonal rather than dramatic. Takumi’s practised rituals from the first half of the film are repeated in the company of the Playmode outsiders, recalling Hamaguchi’s penchant for doubles and folding time, yet with a more sinister quality. A thorny tree Takumi advises Hana not to touch later appears dripping with another character’s blood. Gunshots resound in the distance, piercing the village’s impression of harmony. The same fawn corpse in the forest is encountered twice, bringing the spectre of death closer and closer.

True to his enigmatic character, Takumi is obliging yet reserved with the Playmode employees; even as Takahashi becomes naïvely infatuated with the idea of becoming the glamping site’s caretaker, his true perspective on the matter is never fully articulated. We get the sense, however, that Takumi’s time with the city folk is a test of some sort, prodding the bounds of what begins to feel like a bucolic fantasy rooted in control.

Then comes a shock conclusion which, though it may feel sudden, eventually seems to accord with the film’s escalating mood – like the surface of a frozen lake finally fracturing after too many careless crossings. Perhaps, the film’s oblique title seems to suggest, there is no good or evil, only the natural order of things. Smaller acts are part of a larger process; employees caught in a soulless corporate ruse are only carrying out their boss’s orders. Maybe these things aren’t even a matter of morality, or individual moments, but of something more primal, like the energies of life and death that swirl, ever-present, between breathing things.

Evil Does Not Exist (Hi Gloss Entertainment) is released nationally on 18 April 2024.