What did the ending of Evil Does Not Exist mean?

I saw Evil Does Not Exist in theaters a few months ago and was digging it a lot... and then the ending arrived. It left me utterly baffled, like I hadn't understood the story that was presented to me at all, wondering if there's some giant picture I failed to get a good look at. In fact I found the ending so confusing I ended up hating it.
If somebody else has seen this movie and is able to deciper what Hamaguchi's intent was, I would love to hear it.

__________________

Did you watch it at a festival or do you live somewhere where it was released early?

At a festival.

I can't believe Hamaguchi is using those upper-hand normie repellants and they work so well. He did it before with Asako I & II. They're almost like gimmicks, but they work because the dude is a genius.

My write-up about Evil Does Not Exist below. Maybe it'll shed some light on the ending.

__________________
Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Yeah, that did not sound elitist at all

Gatekeeping is good. It was a pleasure to observe what happened after Drive My Car won the Oscar.

What did happen? I don't remember lots of people becoming Hamaguchi fans.

Look, if they guy wants to preach to a smaller audience, that's totally his prerogative. I think he's missing out on the potential that comes with reaching a wider audience, but who are we to tell him what kinds of movies he should make?

Exactly.

It's cool for Hamaguchi that his film won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. It was recognized by more people and so on. I hoped he wouldn't sell out and would continue making great cinema. Evil Does Not Exist is his worst in about 10 years, but still amazing, so I'm looking forward to what he'll come up with next.

Back to the Oscar, the worst part is that, sure, thanks to Drive My Car winning an Oscar, more people got to know it. The trouble is that they didn't approach watching this film as "Drive My Car or another film by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi." No, they approached it as "Drive My Car, an Oscar winner."

And immediately a cloud of normies poured out, who, approaching the film, expected something completely different from what the film offered. Of course, quite a few of them pulled out their phones during the screening and mindlessly played with them. They didn't come to the theater to see the movie Drive My Car. They came to the theater to see an Oscar movie. There's a bit of dissonance between the critical acclaim and the personal tastes of the normies.

Some of those bloody normies went home and wrote on their Letterboxd account what an "objectively good movie" it is, but left it unrated because it's "not a movie for them." Others mindlessly retweeted thoughts from last year's (actually, annual) Oscars about why all the films that win there are weak and overrated. Finally, yet another subgroup of the normies admitted that the film simply surpassed them and they got bored. They found the film pretentious, gave it some ridiculously low rating, and went back to their daily lives with a smile on their lips. The highest-rated films of those people on Letterboxd include The Green Mile, Forrest Gump, The Dark Knight, and Promising. Young. Woman.

And yes, many of those people are "critics" - a position now completely discredited, an insult to honor rather than any kind of distinction. The only thing those people are able to spout about Drive My Car, other than "boring and pretentious" are some arbitrary, meaningless keywords like "Chekhov" and "Murakami." They can't even understand the author's rights to how he adapts a literary work. The same was true of the latest adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. But that's a topic for another occasion.

So yeah, normies might not get a film, okay. But I expect more from someone who calls himself a critic. Meanwhile, those "critics" are just normies in drag. Total film normies.

Sometimes gatekeeping is a good thing.

His themes are very universal. What do you even mean by a wider audience? Normies? **** normies. Hamaguchi doesn't owe them a thing. He should stick to what he's doing. He can't become another sellout.

Good for whom, and in what way? That just sounds like a lot of elitism.

Again, there's an element of elitism that runs through much of what you post. Certainly some great directors of the 20th Century managed to make really great movies while also reaching wide audiences.

David Lean. John Ford. Alfred Hitchcock. Akira Kurosawa. Stanley Kubrick. Ernst Lubitsch. Federico Fellini. Orson Welles. Ingmar Bergman. Billy Wilder. Frank Capra. John Huston. William Wyler. Fred Zinneman. Otto Preminger.

Those weren't just a bunch of hacks. Most of their movies did reasonably well, with an odd turkey here and there.

Sure, so? What's your point?

A director is an artist. An artist doesn't have to make films that reach wide audiences. Some of these directors, while great, had their works butchered (Kurosawa's Idiot, Welles' everything safe for Kane). Many were studio directors, working for a bowl of rice. And yet they exceeded at their art. Fellini was a rare breed of arthouse filmmaker whose films gained mainstream appeal. I used to hate Fellini but I warmed up to him through the years.

But the directors you named are just a select few. I could name two, three, or four as many that were just as great and worked just as hard in just as hard a studio system, but they never reached a wide audience, whatever this means anyway.

I think 'wide audience' is a misnomer anyway.

True, but if the underlying themes and messages in their work are truly universal, then reaching wide audiences is something that will very often come naturally.

Hard disagree. The themes and messages are one thing. How they're conveyed through style is another. And then you have things such as fame, limelight, and so on.

Tarkovsky's themes are truly universal, too, and yet his films are regularly flowing above normies' heads. At this point many just pretend they like/get them because Tarkovsky became Arthouse 101. It's better to observe normies' reactions to films outside of the obvious canon. They really show their taste/true colors when faced with a less obvious masterpiece.

But isn't the very essence of cinema the ability to convey thoughts, ideas and emotions in a way that truly transcends time and space?

If an artist has been blessed with the opportunity, so to speak, to put themes and ideas out there that will transcend time and space, is it not perhaps a little bit wasteful to not try to make the most of it?

Is it not better when the artist's ideas are like a seed that has spread far and wide?

Maybe. But the artist doesn't owe you an in-your-face explanation or accessible style. I believe it should be the other way around. To make films as cryptic and mysterious as it gets. Or as obvious as it gets, but with an unfathomable mystery hidden in plain sight. Film is not just about telling the story but also about the amazing ways one can do it.

In what way? Pander to the general audience by explaining everything and leaving no mystery, nothing to think about, no style to be amazed at? Modern mainstream cinema has lost its artistry as it is. They used to know how to block a shot, where to put the camera, and how to create aesthetically pleasing images. Even insufferable sugar-coated melodramas of Sirk or musicals of Minnelli have amazing visuals. This is a long-lost art. Some have tried but they just cannot recreate this look without a comical effect. Digital just doesn't cut it. You cannot fake the beauty of Technicolor, or Eastmancolor with digital. Pick a Suzuki film from his early career, something like Inn of the Floating Weeds and marvel at how fresh this film is. It's from 1957 and yet Suzuki has a verve most modern filmmakers lack. So many interesting camera movements and shot angles - you really feel he's trying. Modern filmmakers don't try. They forgot how to make films. They just put the camera down and start rolling. They'll fill the rest with CGI anyway. That's why art cinema nowadays is more important than ever. But this doesn't mean art cinema must appeal to the normies because if it does, the normies will devour it, regurgitate it and make it their own, e.g., just like the rest of modern mainstream cinema.

You can spread your seed far and wide and merely brush a few people. But if you concentrate your seed on a specific point, a miracle will happen.

I do not want (nor do I usually appreciate) "an in-your-face explanation or accessible style" - quite the contrary. For my own personal preference, there can be no better art than that which defies easy explanation and does not limit itself to "accessible style". There are, however, some exquisitely multi-layered pieces of work out there, including some amazing movies, that can work on different levels for different people.

The artist doesn't owe you anything, either. Artists should make the kind of art they really want to make - but I wouldn't want to see them starving for it, either. Would you?

Aren't we just incredibly fortunate to live in an era where so many great films from decades past are (for the most part, anyway) easily and readily accessible? We should hope they would become even more easily accessible!!

That just sounds like more elitism. The most powerful ideas are the ideas that spread rapidly and become stuck on people's minds. Some would equate that with "going viral," but it has happened in the arts since time immemorial. Some art is just more likely to make an impression, and some of it will just be forgotten.

I learned about him because of of the Oscars (possibly, anyways) I haven’t watched Drive My Car yet. I started with his firsts films, and I love Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Haven’t seen Haply Hour yet, but I’m ready to dive into Drive My car regardless.
I wouldn’t have known about him if it hadn’t been for Drive My Car. (Although there is a slight chance I may have heard of Wheel of Fortune And Fantasy first, because it seemed familiar when I looked him up).

A cinephile shouldn’t care for how other people concern themselves with films.
And gatekeeping is dumb.

In case you're interested, Happy Hour is streaming on the Criterion Channel through the end of the month.

This is a really good point. Especially in the age of the Internet.

So you're saying there's never been a better time to be an elitist snob?

I haven't watched it since October, so some of the details have been lost in my mind and I recall my friend and I had to work out the ambiguous nature of the time jumps to determine where we landed on what the actual sequence of things were, but, at a high level of what you were asking:


I apologize if my shitty memory got things wrong and confused things. I apologize if my take is just fundamentally unsound (probably compounded by time and my general degradation of memory). But does that sound about right based on what you were wrestling with?