Evil Does Not Exist
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi originally intended Evil Does Not Exist to be a 30-minute short but realised somewhere along the way that he had the makings of a bigger film on his hands, one that’s part thriller, part meditation on (and manipulation of) audience sympathies. In a variation on the WB Yeats line “There are no strangers here; Only friends you haven’t yet met” – beloved of expat Irish bars – Hamaguchi seems to be saying that in the movies there are no bad guys, just characters we haven’t been introduced to properly. Get close and evil does not exist, just complexity. See also Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance trilogy for more on this. First up, in what’s … Read more