Evil Does Not Exist

After breaking into the mainstream and nabbing a best directing nom at the 2022 Oscars, “Drive My Car” director Ryusuke Hamaguchi kept the ball rolling and set the Biennale ablaze with this modest but conceptually bold cautionary tale about corporate greed and the disruptive effects of rural development.

The stakes are plain: The residents of a small, peaceful village in the outskirts of Tokyo including a widowed father (Hitoshi Omika) gather in a town hall meeting to mull over the pros and cons of accepting a lucrative offer by some big-shot developers to build a large glamping site nearby.

In the hands of a less thoughtful filmmaker, this could’ve easily turned out to be a one-note, paint-by-numbers eco-parable about upstanding, nature-loving townspeople holding their ground and scaring off a bunch of greedy corporate shills. But if you’ve seen Hamaguchi’s previous work, you know better than to expect conventional heroes and villains. Instead, the director paints a rather nuanced portrait of average people with different shades of grey trying to keep afloat with the cards they’ve been dealt.