Evil Does Not Exist
Ok something happened at the end of this movie, but frankly I don’t get it. It involves deer in some way.
The basic story is that there is a pristine village in the Japanese wilderness, where they have one soba restaurant, and one odd-job guy who gets water and chops wood and that kind of thing. Probably the first half hour of the movie is him getting water and chopping wood, and teaching his daughter the names of trees. Kind of boring, but presumably setting the scene for something. Some corporate types appear to give a presentation about how they want to create a “glamping” site in the area, and we have debates about where the septic tank should go, how many employees should be on site, how much pollution will be involved. You (me), the viewer are clearly primed from all media to jump in on the side of the locals with their getting water and chopping wood way of life, fuck these city slickers who don’t know what they’re talking about, doing Powerpoints and having neat haircuts. But then we actually follow the two of them back to Tokyo, and behold, they are also three dimensional humans who have hopes and dreams and, having also seen media, are instinctively on the side of the locals as well. In fact, the guy Tokyo-ite loves it so much there after chopping one piece of wood and getting a small amount of water, that he wants to be the employee on site.
Then the handyman’s daughter goes missing. Everyone looks for her. Handyman and Tokyo guy find her in a clearing with some deer. One of the deer is shot? Or the daughter is dead? Or - and this was my actual first thought - they were all deer all along? Nonetheless, the handyman out of nowhere murders the other guy by choking him to death and then zooms off into the woods where his daughter may or may not be a deer. There’s symbolism here, but what it is symbolising - at the risk of looking dumb - is lost on me.