In this text, I will only try to decipher the shocking and at the same time enigmatic ending of the film (spoiler alert!). The ambiguity of the title “Evil Does Not Exist” will also be explained. The plot of the film is very simple and needs no explanation, but it is the ending that is disturbing and seems completely inconsistent with the rest of the film. However, this is only the case at first glance, because on closer inspection, the protagonist’s “evil” act is consistent with his attitude to life.
At the end of the film, the conflicts in the plot seem to have been resolved: Takahashi, who originally wanted to build a luxury campsite in the village against the consent of the local population as a representative of a large company from Tokyo and thus destroy nature, has changed his mind and now also wants to live in harmony with nature, just like the protagonist Takumi. But when Hana, Takumi’s little daughter, suddenly goes missing, the film radically changes direction. In the final scene, Takumi and Takahashi find Hana dead. Takahashi wants to help the girl, but before he can get close he is stopped by Takumi and choked.
Why did Takumi, who appears to us throughout the entire film as a nature-loving and good person, suddenly attack another person who was trying to help his daughter? To find out, we need to reconstruct the backstory and understand the context. After Hana went missing, a baby deer was probably shot and injured by a hunter. The child Hana wanted to approach the animal and help, but was attacked and killed by the mother deer. The deer is normally a peaceful animal, but when its offspring are threatened, it can become aggressive and brutal. But as an animal that has only reacted instinctively and wanted to protect its baby, it cannot commit a morally evil act. Thinking of the film title, we could provisionally postulate here: Evil does not exist in nature.
What happens shortly after this incident is nothing other than a mirror image of this previous animal-human encounter. When Takumi and Takahashi find Hana, she is already dead. Takumi, who is normally a peaceful person, suddenly becomes aggressive and attacks Takahashi, who actually wanted to help Takumi’s injured daughter and do a good deed. But like the deer, which as an instinctive creature cannot recognize that a child means no harm, Takumi cannot recognize that Takahashi means no harm either. But Takumi is a human and not a deer and it seems difficult to justify his action with the same argument that we used for the animal: Evil does not exist in nature. Because as a human being, he is part of both nature and culture (which also includes moral thinking). We could say that Takumi has become pure nature and is not part of culture. This is also how the character is portrayed, living alone in the forest and far from civilization.
And it is precisely at this point that the film reveals a contradiction that perhaps casts the entire film and its plot in a different light. The film portrays the small village with Takumi and the villagers as a natural idyll, a paradisiacal original state that has not yet been destroyed by capitalism and civilization. When the two representatives of the large company from Tokyo arrive and tell the villagers about the plan to build a luxury campsite near the village, the villagers are against it because the campsite would pollute the clean springs in the forest. Culture threatens nature. This feeling is also reinforced by the aesthetic and meditative images of nature. But as we saw above with Takumi’s attack, a total absence of culture, i.e. pure nature, leads to a loss of morality and to actions that seem “evil” to us from a human perspective.
But this contradiction between nature and culture is not only visible in the battle between village and city, but also in the relationship between Takumi and Hana. Takumi is a man who is completely connected to nature, but at the same time is unable to build an empathetic, human relationship with his daughter Hana. One could say that he behaves too much like an instinct-driven animal and too little like a rational human being.
So, we can ultimately conclude that the film subverts its superficial message, which presents us with the villagers as the good guys and the city people as the bad guys – nature is good, culture is bad. Too much nature can make people do things that are evil in the human world, because they make them lack empathy and fall victim to their instincts. Man has left paradise and eaten from the tree of knowledge. As it says in the Bible: “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:4–5) After eating the forbidden fruit, men lost their unity with nature, but gained the ability to distinguish between good and evil.
“Evil Does Not Exist” applies to nature and its animals, because there is no possibility of evil there, because they have no freedom and cannot choose between good and evil. For humans, however, “Evil Does Exist” applies and this possibility of evil is also our freedom.
Matthias Kyska
Othon Cinema 
Yorum bırakın