The intention was to discuss George Miller’s “Furiosa” at length this week, but I don’t have it in me. Miller, who created the “Mad Max” series and has directed all of its installments, has forgotten more about kinetic filmmaking than mere mortals will ever know, and that talent is undeniably on display in “Furiosa.” It is a gargantuan movie with two incredible action set pieces and hallucinatory imagery and enough mythmaking for 10 tent-poles. What it doesn’t have, besides the usual references to the hopelessness that many of us have about contemporary society, is much of a point.
Miller’s prior “Fury Road” is as good as it’s reputed to be — a relentless linear thriller with action that’s poetic and seemingly impossible to achieve. After a strong first hour, “Furiosa” moves in circles, and it put me in a similar place as the recent “Dune: Part Two.” Both films are so impressively mounted and yet I don’t care. They devote so much time to their David Lean and Sergio Leone cosplay, and yet they are almost contemptuously indifferent to matters of humans saying human things.
Let’s not dwell. There are greater hopeless movies to see this Memorial Day weekend.
Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s “Evil Does Not Exist” is a departure from his “Drive My Car,” a surprise nominee for the Best Picture Oscar a few years ago. That was an essentially humanist drama, following a grieving theater director as he transmutes his emotions into an adaptation of Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya.” “Evil Does Not Exist,” however, operates in a chillier, elliptical register, redolent of the most searing portions of Hamaguchi’s “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.” All of these films are in various ways extraordinary.
“Evil Does Not Exist” opens on an extended series of shots of trees as seen from the ground looking up. The camera moving below them suggests that we are watching the trees from the vantage point of a corpse being carried in a funeral procession. Astute critics have compared these images to a famous scene from Dreyer’s 1932 “Vampyr.” As we float among the trees, we intuit that this film isn’t going to play by typical rules. A gauntlet is being thrown. Hamaguchi, one of the most gifted filmmakers of the last decade, is stretching his wings and challenging his aesthetic, honing it to a fine point.
This sequence in the woods will make audiences camera-conscious. We are aware of the director flexing, and we assume that he’s preparing us for something dreadful. In another scene that’s staged in a long, unbroken shot, the protagonist drives to pick his child up from school and as he passes by other children outside, they appear to be frozen in place. They are revealed to be playing a game, but the initial randomness of the image, the casual sense of “wrongness,” is startling. A later scene is shot from a camera that’s been affixed to the hood of a car, fixating on a receding horizon as it trails away. These eccentric camera angles deliberately call attention to themselves, creating a tension that’s exacerbated by Ishibashi Eiko’s haunting Philip Glass-y score.
Mizubiki Village, a small countryside community that’s close enough to Tokyo to offer a convenient respite from frenetic city life, is the film’s unforgettable setting. With mountainside vistas, rich forests, and small, homey businesses, Mizubiki Village appears to be exactly what it is: an idyllic realm that hasn’t been spoiled yet by corporate development. Such places obviously cannot be permitted to last. They must be riven with franchises and high-rise lofts, so that the working-class people who live there can be chased off to make room for people capable of spending more money. Once Mizubiki Village has been turned into another overstuffed and impersonal Everyplace, its touristy new residents will look to another little rural town as a vacation spot, and set about ruining it too. Humans of means tend to resemble locusts.
None of that explicitly happens in “Evil Does Not Exist,” but these possibilities flood your mind as salespeople are sent to talk with the village about developing a glamping site that represents the first step in an alien-yuppie invasion. An ordinary filmmaker would’ve scored easy points on the folks sent to sell the site. By contrast, Hamaguchi reveals the representatives of the glamping project to be sympathetic cogs in an indifferent machine. Takahashi (Kosaka Ryuji) and Mayuzumi (Shibutani Ayaka) are adrift and a little goofy. In a long town hall meeting that serves as the film’s centerpiece of political drama, they essentially admit to not knowing what they are doing.
The town hall sequence plays to one of Hamaguchi’s strengths: extended group scenes that are dense with emotional and political reverberations. The rehearsal scenes of “Drive My Car” come to mind, or the ecstatic, seemingly real-time daily rituals of 2015’s “Happy Hour.” The town’s citizens, angry under a cracking veneer of politeness, discuss all the ways that a glamping site will disrupt their community, such as polluting the natural drinking water with sewage. By this point in the film, Hamaguchi’s extended shots of Mizubiki Village allow us to feel as if we know the place ourselves.
This political drama is draped over “Evil Does Not Exist” as a pall, an acknowledgement of how we’re developing the natural wonder of the Earth and our lives away. But the minute-to-minute experience of the film is one of beautiful and austere surrealism. The protagonist is Takumi (Omika Hitoshi), a handyman and jack of all trades who lives in the gorgeous snow-crested woods with his eight-year-old daughter, Hana (Nishikawa Ryo). His days appear to be of divine simplicity, with firewood chopping, and the gathering of the creek water for the noodle shop. Hamaguchi holds on a long shot of Takumi chopping his wood. If you have to ask “why?” this may not be your movie.
Hamaguchi equates regular narrative conventions with the glamping site as constrictions to be shucked for the sake of earthier poetry. Filmmakers often underrate the value of showing audiences a process, but details are fascinating, and Takumi’s wood-chopping is more transfixing to me than the 80th car chase in “Furiosa.” There are shots of a frozen lake that have an otherworldly, seemingly ‘found’ mystery that might’ve made Tarkovsky blush. The details here are so crystalline, vivid, yet the film with those tracking shots and that score and this unusual setting nevertheless feels elusive like a memory. Hamaguchi inspires you to feel that you are remembering “Evil Does Not Exist” as you watch it, and then he drops the trapdoor out from under you.
Odd details — stories of hunting deer, sounds of gunshots, the funeral symbolism — quietly anticipate the film’s ending, which takes a hard detour into a nightmare. Plot strands —including a poignant buddy situation between Takumi and Takahashi — are dropped unresolved, while the interlopers’ influence on the village exerts an unexpected and terrible influence. Hamaguchi communicates the violation of Mizubiki Village by cutting his narrative down into hard and evocative shards, thusly violating conventional expectations of resolution. The film is a trance, a requiem, and maybe a sign of a shift in Hamaguchi’s aesthetic. “Evil Does Not Exist” has stayed in my system for over a year. I’ve seen it three times and am eager to return again.
Hamaguchi mentored under filmmaker Kurosawa Kiyoshi, who’s most famous for metaphorical horror movies like “Cure” and “Pulse.” Kurosawa is a master of long, elegant, combustible takes that suggest the filmmaking equivalent of the reverberation of a plucked harp. These takes are intensified by their contexts, usually involving a malignant entity that physicalizes modern alienation. Hamaguchi achieves this kind of pregnant tension in “Evil Does Not Exist,” and so does Kurosawa himself in “Chime,” a remarkable return to form.
Much like “Evil Does Not Exist,” “Chime” is a tightly coiled social horror movie. In each film, the environment arguably strikes back at modern human industrialization. In “Chime,” a cooking class is disrupted by a sound that an odd student claims he can hear. I’m not usually skittish about “spoilers,” but that’s about as far as I want to go with describing the narrative. There’s no big twist here. The surprise is in how the film moves and in Kurosawa’s unusual emphases. The metallic sheen of the industrial building and of the kitchen knives suggests an inhumanly perfect, precise, and dangerous realm. The kind of place that Hamaguchi’s village might turn into in a few generations. And who knows? Three hundred years later this city could be revealed to have devolved into the satirical gun- and gas-powered wastelands of “Furiosa.”
Kurosawa keeps you on edge, and figurative landmines detonate unpredictably. The great accomplishment of “Chime,” though, is its singular eeriness: it’s so quiet and tactile that it’s irrational. It feels like the visualization of a universal social anxiety that we didn’t even know we had: a contagious disassociation that suggests the supernatural element of “Pulse” and the mass media of real life. And “Chime” is even more brutally abbreviated than “Evil Does Not Exist,” ending with the implication that the horrors just witnessed are but a preamble to something vastly worse, something un-seeable.
“Furiosa” is playing in theaters everywhere. “Evil Does Not Exist” is now playing at Movieland, while “Chime” is streaming on demand.
