A slow, inexorable camera movement transports us through a winter forest. The camera gazes upward, through bare branches silhouetted against a white, milky sky. A spectral, minimal waltz, composed by Eiko Ishibashi, accompanies this hypnotic glide. We are not simply watching a landscape; we are assuming the perspective of something in motion, perhaps a sylvan spirit, or perhaps we are merely passengers in a vehicle, silent witnesses to a world that still breathes according to ancestral rhythms. This opening sequence, which in another film would be a banal establishing shot, in the cinema of Ryusuke Hamaguchi becomes a statement of intent, a prologue that is already a philosophical thesis. It recalls the almost cosmic gravity with which Andrei Tarkovsky filmed water and wind in Stalker, but here, transcendence is stripped of any religious superstructure, becoming purely telluric, immanent.

We are in Mizubiki, a small village near Tokyo, a place where the community lives in a delicate, almost symbiotic balance with the surrounding nature. The silent protagonist of this symphony is Takumi, a handyman who seems the very incarnation of the place: a man of few words, precise gestures, and a deep, instinctive knowledge of the forest’s cycles. We see him chopping wood with a rhythmic precision, collecting pristine water from a spring, teaching his young daughter Hana to recognize plants. Each of his actions is a ritual, a micro-liturgy that affirms a world order. This order, however, is about to be fractured. A Tokyo consulting firm, on behalf of a talent agency seeking post-pandemic diversification, plans to build a luxury "glamping" site right there, close to the spring that feeds the village.

The heart of the film is the meeting—or rather, the clash—of these two cosmologies. On one side, the company representatives, Takahashi and Mayuzumi, armed with PowerPoint slides, corporate jargon, and a baffling naivety. On the other, the villagers, whose wisdom is not bookish but empirical, passed down through generations. The long public assembly sequence is a masterpiece of writing and direction, a comedy of misunderstandings that slowly veers toward existential drama. Hamaguchi orchestrates a ballet of miscomprehension that is not merely linguistic, but ontological. The consultants speak of "healing" and "immersive experiences," but they fail to grasp that the water they plan to pollute with a poorly designed septic tank is not a resource, but life itself. They do not understand that the warden they propose to hire to "control" the site is an urban solution applied to a problem their very presence has created. It is a dialectic that recalls, in some ways, the moral parables of Éric Rohmer, but stripped of their bourgeois matrix and plunged into a far more primordial conflict: that between the logic of efficiency and that of sustainability.

The film's most brilliant and subversive aspect lies in its very title: "There Is No Evil". Hamaguchi does not paint the two Tokyo agents as cartoonish villains. On the contrary, they are clumsy, inadequate, even pathetic in their shallow goodwill. "Evil" here is not a Manichean entity, not a malignant intention. It is, rather, an absence. It is the lack of imagination, the inability to see consequences, the superficiality of a system that prizes short-term profit over long-term stability. It is the banal, systemic evil that Hannah Arendt described not as an abyss of perversion, but as the void of thought. Takahashi and Mayuzumi are not bad; they are simply disconnected. Their tragedy is that, slowly, they begin to understand this. Seduced by the quiet and by Takumi's iron logic, they begin a journey of awareness. They decide to stay, to "learn" the rhythm of the place, to chop wood with him. It is an attempt at redemption, a desire for reconnection.

Here, another production anomaly reveals itself as a key to interpretation: the film originated as visual material for a concert by Eiko Ishibashi, titled "GIFT". This explains its almost musical structure, its rhythm punctuated by pauses and accelerations, and its nature as a visual parable culminating in an ending as enigmatic as it is shattering. When little Hana disappears into the woods at dusk, the film abandons its almost documentary-like realism and plunges into a dreamlike and disturbing territory, evoking the surrealism of a Haruki Murakami story more than social cinema. The discovery of the child, the appearance of a wounded deer, Takumi's final reaction: Hamaguchi denies us an explanation, a catharsis, a clear moral.

What happens in those last, chilling minutes? Interpretations abound, and it is precisely in this polysemy that the work's greatness lies. Is it a violent reaction from nature itself, which, through Takumi—its guardian and perhaps its armed enforcer—expels the alien element at the very moment it believed it had integrated? Is it an allegory of the fact that certain boundaries, once crossed, permit no return, and that the attempt to "touristify" the sacred inevitably leads to its profanation and a reparative violence? Or perhaps, in a more meta-textual reading, it is the very rupture of the narrative contract, a Hanekian gesture that punishes the viewer for seeking consolation, an easy synthesis between the two worlds. The violated balance cannot be simply restored; the wound inflicted upon the village's world-system provokes a spasm, an immune response as instinctive as it is brutal.

Throughout the film, Takumi embodies a contemporary, Japanese version of the classic Western's "frontiersman" archetype, a man who lives on the border between two worlds, understanding both but belonging fully to neither. But unlike the cowboy who "civilizes" the frontier, Takumi protects it. And when that protection fails, his reaction is not that of a hero, but of a force of nature, as impersonal and definitive as an avalanche or a flood.

"There Is No Evil" is a work that operates on a deep, almost subliminal level. It is an ecological thriller disguised as a rural drama, a philosophical poem that takes the form of a moral tale. It is a cinematic koan: a paradoxical question that does not seek an answer but aims to shake the foundations of our certainties. Hamaguchi, after the sentimental and literary epic of Drive My Car, moves onto more slippery and metaphysical ground, confirming his place as one of the most lucid and radical voices in contemporary cinema. He leaves us with an indelible image and a question that continues to resonate long after the credits roll: if evil does not exist as an intention, but only as the consequence of a thoughtless action, can its punishment be anything other than an equally blind, instinctive, and terrible reaction? In that silent forest, balance is everything, and its price is absolute.