The editorial approach of One Thing is implicit in its title: We take on a single subject at a time. Some of our most popular pieces have been about cultural debates and trends, but I think there’s also room to dabble in Vulture-style reviews. Should I watch this one movie / read this one book / listen to this one podcast that everyone is talking about? In this case, the answer is yes.
Kyle Chayka: The first ten minutes of Evil Does Not Exist, a new film by the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi (of Oscar-winning Drive My Car fame), is an almost-static shot showing a few people laboriously filling cans of water from a crystal-clear stream in the mountains somewhere outside of Tokyo. The landscape is sunny and the slow, deliberate action is hypnotic if you’re into that sort of thing, like slow TV or nature TikTok. After that’s there’s wood chopping. Trailers will not really help you understand the film, and to even to describe much of the plot would be to ruin it. But it’s a terrific moviegoing experience, because the placid visuals contrast so sharply with the mounting tension of the story and its sharp-edged structure. Far from ambient entertainment, it’s a piece of art that requires thinking through every frame.
In other words, Evil Does Not Exist does not give anything away. Drive My Car was a three-hour drama about staging theater in multiple languages at once, but it had the consolations of a cool car, hot actors, and bohemian lifestyle aesthetics (the main character’s all-black outfits alone are worth it). Here, the viewer has to find her own satisfaction. The set-up is bare bones: A sketchy Tokyo talent agency is trying to set up a glamping site in the midst of a bucolic village, whose entrenched locals include an odd-job man, his young daughter, an elderly village chief, the proprietor of an udon restaurant, and her partner. They are stolid, firm folk who resist the slick agency workers in a community meeting. Consequences follow when you resist nature in this landscape, they warn. Still, the agency staffers return, eager to complete their mission. Then, an accident befalls the village. Perhaps?
Amidst the enjoyable pans of bright winter scenery and the Snow Peak-core outdoors outfits, there is ominous, repeating imagery: the sun through the tree canopy, an empty field, looming deer — nature as an omnipresent, suprahuman force. These, along with the various ambiguously motivated characters, are pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together until the last second. A huge flaw of Netflix-era filmmaking is that its pacing is monotonously consistent, the homogenous texture of tomato soup. Not so here. Evil Does Not Exist is the kind of film that leaves you sitting stunned in the theater for ten or fifteen minutes after it ends. Then you go get a drink (we went to Cafe Riggs for martinis) and debate what it all meant.
Previously on One Thing: An investigation of the Spanish aesthetic of “cutre,” a word for the desirable tackiness that can be found in old-school restaurants, grumpy bartenders, and traditional food served on metal plates.
the zoom meeting being taken from the car is perfect! 😭
the steaming pile of shit, so beautiful!
takahashi not being able to chop wood well, relatable!
I really rated this one. The local rep showed it for two nights, and I nearly missed it too, as I didn't realize that it was Hamaguchi's latest until I looked it up. I'm surprised that it didn't have more press given the accolades that Drive My Car received. Agreed that it demands the reader's attention, but it also rewards it too. The slow, real-time footage of protagonist filling the water jugs, cutting wood, and walking with his daughter are quite relaxing and enjoyable in their own right. But that ending! Really does leave a ton to talk about.