Evil Does Not Exist
Summary:
I moved into Lincoln Square at the beginning of the month and I wanted to watch a movie at the Lincoln center. Of the movies playing this seemed the most accessible.The movie started off fairly normal. There was a long intro of life in this rural Japanese town where the protagonist is a handyman. He chops wood, carries water, literally. He has a daughter, and his wife has passed away. There is a company trying to develop a glamping facility in the town and host a town hall. The villagers raise their concerns about the additional sewage in the system. The protagonist leads the conversations here in a subtle patriarchal way where he doesn’t say the most but is the most collected and authoritative in his tone. The two representatives go back to the company and bring up the concerns. The company executives don’t care and try to push forward. The two representatives drive back to the village, and bond over their dating life and how they’re disillusioned by this job. They meet the protagonist at his home. The man has fun chopping wood with the protagonist and wants to stay with him to be an apprentice. They all drive to eat at the town restaurant. On the drive there the protagonist mentions that deer don’t hurt people, unless they’ve been shot and are trying to protect their young. The protagonists daughter goes missing. The man and the protagonist go into a field where the daughter is laying dead. There is a flashback type thing where the scene shows a deer that is shot, with a fawn nearby. The man starts towards the daughters body but the protagonist stops him and chokes him out. He is likely dead, despite him getting up and falling again.
Review:
The ending made me feel uneasy. When the deer attacks, there is no evil intent, because the animal does not have the concept of morality. It is reactive. But humans do have the ability to reason about the consequences of their actions, and the moral weight of each action. The films portrays the representative as aloof, overstepping his bounds: he is ignorant of the ways of the town, he becomes naively enamored by the experience of chopping wood, and decides to apprentice. Still, he didn't do anything wrong in trying to run towards the child's body. I think there is some Japanese cultural norm here I'm missing: maybe it's rude to not allow the parent to go first. Whatever it is, it seemed unreasonable to choke the person out for that. I think this wasn't ambiguous, but the director attempted to portray some ambiguity here.
Despite my disagreement with the message, the film got me thinking, and the visuals & soundtrack were great. For that I'll give it a 3/5.