There Is No Evil: The Endings of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Fable

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s No Evil Existed in theaters last Wednesday, and its ending raises questions. Open to all sorts of interpretations, it closes with a story centered on the meeting of Takumi, a woodsman of sorts in a small Japanese rural community with two townspeople, Takahashi and Mayuzumi, who come to convince him of the virtues of the installation. “Glamour” site (glamorous and comfortable camp).

In any case, the headmaster left knowingly “Mysterious Place”. to the microphone pointHe stated: “It is impossible for us to explain everything in life, and I believe that it should be so in certain works as well. Anyway, some elements in this movie elude intelligence and are pure emotion. The end came to me like that, I can’t explain it any other way.”

what happens at the end

Craftsman Takumi and Takahashi, a former celebrity agent and glamping representative, arrive in the field. We see a young Hana, Takumi’s daughter, facing a wounded deer (perfectly with a rifle bullet) and she approaches the beast. Earlier in the film we were told that a wounded deer could be dangerous. Takahashi wants to go forward to help her, but Hana’s father attacks her and chokes her until she passes out.

Takumi then goes to see Hana. He lies unconscious and bleeding from his nose. Father will pick him up and take him with him. Takahasa struggles to his feet, gasping for breath, then falls back to the ground. We find a recurring motif of the film: the branches of the trees towards the sky, as if someone is looking up. who walks with difficulty. the end of the movie.

The film currently has the best press rating of the year!

What could this mean?

There are as many theories as there are viewers, but some keep coming back more than others:

• Takahashi moves closer to the deer to try to help Hana, putting her in danger despite Takumi’s earlier advice, and the latter, seeing this, flies away in a rage and strangles her. Meanwhile, off camera, a little girl is killed by a panicked deer. The city has tried to force nature’s cycle and is paying the price. One death in the village, one death in the city, a precious balance is maintained for the theme of the film.

• The little girl is dead from the beginning of the movie. Takumi forgets to pick up his daughter from school, which is systematically reminded by… the sound of gunshots in the distance. But in this case, the scenes where the teacher informs the father that the little one is gone and with the feather-loving mayor on the hunt to find him no longer make sense. Unless it’s just exhaust. The final hunt simply serves Takumi to trick Takahasa into killing him and stopping the progress of the glamping project. But how long, if the man looking at the trees, is an agent of the stars, and he survives?

A vision of the future?

• Another theory: evil does not exist… in nature. Panicked, the deer kills Hanna, who gets too close to it, an instinctual and animal reflex. Takumi kills Takahashi for getting too close to his son, which is also an instinctive and animalistic reflex. In addition to the fact that there are no consequences in nature, but in humans there is a concept of “evil”. Takum has committed an irreparable crime and is suffering the consequences.

• Hana is already dead when they arrive at the field (we’ve already seen the little one near the deer during the day and the adults arrive at night) and if we see her standing it’s because Takumi and Takahashi are reenacting what happened. Takahashi rushes to the child’s body, but Takumi, refusing to face reality, prefers to kill him.

• It is a symbolic vision of the future. Once the glamping is installed, as Takum predicted, tourists – probably children – will be harmed by animals and/or hunters. Evil will exist. It doesn’t exist yet, and it might still be possible to stop it. A note of ecological optimism in a way.

Which of these theories appeals to you the most? Youtube, Reddit, and your brain have really blown away the supposed possibilities, but at the end of the day, anyone is free to make their own movie. And that’s part of what’s great about cinema.