Metacritic-Rezensionen

It is an absorbing film of quiet power.

A quiet, funny, confounding mystery.

Evil Does Not Exist is a slow-moving film with few epiphanies and no answers to the questions it posits.

Japanese superstar-in-the-making Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s (Drive My Car) latest film is a touching ecological parable full of little feints and narrative red herrings. Just when you think it’s heading in one direction, it slips off elsewhere, like a fawn in the woods.

It’s a complex drama, a realist film teetering on the edge of the uncanny, whose very title points the way towards the idea that there are shades of grey in every judgment we make.

As a penetrating study of character and milieu, it’s the work of a mature and enormously talented filmmaker not afraid to take chances.

It may not be wholly successful, but it certainly is bleakly fascinating to witness a master filmmaker paint so subtle and soothing a portrait of humanity, only to finally, bitterly remind us that there is no soothing nature – human or otherwise – when there’s a bullet in its belly.

The final few minutes will baffle some, infuriate others, but it will also be the wildness of the imagination which will have you pondering Evil Does Not Exist long after it has ended.

For what it is, the film is immaculately directed and staged with the quiet competence of a superlative filmmaker.

A passionate, well-intentioned deviation in style, Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Evil Does Not Exist doesn’t quite hit the mark with its meditations on nature. However, in its best moments, it’s another entrancing dramatic piece from the Japanese maestro, whose strengths lie less in observing natural environments, and more in observing people’s nature.