Evil Does Not Exist: Downstream Environmental Form Available to Purchase

Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (2023) takes a formal approach to environmental criticism that this article names the “downstream.” Delivered audio-visually and thematically, Hamaguchi’s technique turns a familiar ecological parable into a perception-challenging experience of aesthetic ambiguity and disorientation. Pushing the viewer to look closely and to trace the downstream effects of actions that threaten to disrupt tenuous forms of ecological and social balance, the film offers a generational message about the risks of human action and environmental precarity.