Critic Reviews

It is an absorbing film of quiet power.

Hamaguchi presents an uncomplicated tale about contemporary issues—corporate greed, climate change—packed with so many complex narrative beats that it plays like a dense 19th century novel. It’s simple, but it explains life itself.

It’s far rarer when a movie, as this one does, speaks to everyday life and to the beauty of a world that we neglect even in the face of its calamitous loss.

Evil Does Not Exist, the new film from Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is a slow-burning wonder, an eco-fable of meditative beauty and menace, down-to-earth realism, and mythic resonances.

However you choose to interpret it, Evil Does Not Exist lingers, magnificently and furiously.

So carefully and empathetically constructed – even towards its “villains” – that it feels miles away from didacticism, this shapeshifting ecological tale becomes a yearning rumination on the alienations of modern life, and the quietly violent seams where things in this world are changing and dying rapidly while we lack the language to arrive at the same destination, no matter how much people say they’re listening.

A masterful film that invites contemplation and, in return, delivers lyrical beauty, haunting mystery, and more than a bit of unexpected terror.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi is an expert at crafting films that subtly enthrall our minds, and this is just more proof.

After so fruitful a collaboration on “Drive My Car,” Hamaguchi and Ishibashi may have topped themselves with something even more compelling.

In its own discreet, modest way, Evil Does Not Exist leaves us with a haunting sense of personal and ecological apocalypse.