It’s time to go glamping!
A small village where the villagers are living a happy life gets some visitors representing a company that wants to attract tourists to the village. They aim to build a glamping site for tourists. However, the villagers are skeptical. The company has sent two people to convince the villagers to jump aboard the glamping train, offering urine and feces in their drinking water as a reward, if they are the chosen ones. Let’s go glamping!
I’m not a fan of the director, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. I disliked “Drive My Car”, that overrated piece of fish movie, so I didn’t expect much when I sat down to watch Evil Does Not Exist.
But to my surprise, or not really, since I love slow movies that take me out into nature and give me that calm, Japanese feeling you get from these movies. So I liked the movie, but I didn’t expect it to end the way it did. The ending is a little weird, so be prepared for that. I sort of understood it, but not all of it. But it’s a wild ending, and it will stick with you.
The movie is well-acted and beautifully shot, and it calmed me down. In the first half, we follow the protagonist and his daughter, who live a quiet life. His wife has passed away, and you sense that he’s pretty lost and empty since he forgets to pick up his daughter from school several times. So we follow him doing his daily chores, talking to the other villagers, and stuff like that.
Then in the second half, when the couple from the big city comes for a visit to present their plans for the village and their stupid glamping plans, the movie changes the atmosphere. It becomes darker and more serious, and I was expecting something bad to happen because of the title of the movie.
They are pretty high on themselves at the start of the meeting, but then they get hammered by the villagers during the meeting. When the meeting is over, their souls have been cleansed, and they return to the city as better people. But it’s not over because the company they represent wants them to talk to the protagonist one more time. So we get under the skin of these two characters in the second half. They are humans after all.
Of course, this isn’t a movie for everyone. But if you are like me, who appreciates good movies and not movies like Drive My Car, then Evil Does Not Exist is a movie worth watching if you like slow movies with beautiful cinematography and a half-crazy ending that sort of fits if you pay close attention to the mind of the protagonist.