Evil Does Not Exist in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Unsettling Follow-Up to Drive My Car

opens with the camera languorously tracking through treetops, seen from the ground, until interrupting itself abruptly with a music-stopping shot of Hana , a grade-school-aged girl with her neck craned up – suggesting we were previously sharing her point of view. The implied closeness of that opening shot is the nearest the camera gets to its characters for a while; it’s 10, maybe 15 minutes before anyone in the movie is seen in anything resembling a close-up.

Takumi and Hana aren’t that far from society; Takumi delivers the well water to a local udon restaurant, not exactly a strictly survivalist outpost. But there’s something pristine and untouched about their environment, making the interest of a company called Playmode both natural and horribly unnatural all at once.

Though Takahashi and Mayuzumi do their best to push the company line, writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi then reveals their reservations, and welcome dimensions of humanity, by following them into their car, where they have a more candid talk about their company’s business. Later, they meet up with Takumi to learn more about the village.

Hamaguchi’s previous film, his U.S. breakthrough and recipient of a Best Picture Oscar nomination, was the deliberate, sometimes mesmerizingis only a little over half that movie’s length, and though it allows its characters a certain measure of soul-bearing conversation, it plays certain offscreen developments even closer to the vest. A brief shot of a photo that evidently includes Hana’s mother hints at a family loss, and the possibility that Takumi has brought Hana here as a means of escape.

Yet Takumi and Hana aren’t living entirely to their own devices; opposing forces of nature and capitalism both pose danger to their way of life, even though their lifestyle should, by all rights, be entirely sustainable. Hamaguchi’s film – and the performance style of Omika, a Hamaguchi crew member moving into acting here – is too controlled to produce an anguished tragedy out of this material, but it’s too unsparing to offer an easy exit.

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