by Jarrod Jones. With the 59th Chicago International Film Festival in full swing, DoomRocket is here to highlight its choicest selections. In review: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist; Olmo Schnabel’s Pet Shop Days.
EVIL DOES NOT EXIST. [Japan.]
Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who lit the international world on fire last year with Drive My Car, strikes a subdued, eerie mood with Evil Does Not Exist. The film’s title is meant to be provocative, but its material, at least at first, is tranquil. It unfolds as a deliberate slow-drip of routine, detail, lush winter forest photography, and understated but no less rich swells of feeling. Later, much later, it knocks you to the ground.
The film follows Takumi (Hitoshi Omika), an any-odd-job handyman who serves his small village through physically demanding tasks. Takumi raises Hana (Ryo Nishikawa) on his own, and it feels like their father-daughter relationship has achieved the same peaceful harmony they share with the forests that sprawl around their warm, lovely home. They’re both prone to wandering, which allows us time to soak up the various splendid things in this thriving ecosystem; the canopy of trees, a smattering of lost feathers, and bubbling springs all take on larger meaning thanks to Hamagachi’s framing of them. Takumi and Hana get lost in this natural beauty and sometimes lose track of important life stuff; watching them, the feeling is contagious.
This peace cannot last, we discover, due to an encroaching big-city company looking to open a series of in-demand “glamping” sites (that cringing portmanteau of “camping” and “glam”) to exploit all this splendor for profit. The company sends a talent agency to sell their plans to the wary community and, if necessary, field questions they’re not prepared to answer. (Does the company know what these plans will do to, say, the water supply?) Hamaguchi’s film renders nature as a beautiful and frightening thing to be fiercely defended, and that might explain its ending, which takes the even hand offered to both the people who don’t want change and those who do and balls it into a fist. The final scene kills all this serenity with an abruptness that also disrupts the cool naïveté of its title. It’s rough play, but in the film’s context, which is admittedly somewhat elusive, it’s fair.
8.5 out of 10
Written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Cinematography by Yoshio Kitagawa.
Starring Hitoshi Omika, Ryo Nishikawa, Ryuji Kosaka, and Ayaka Shibutani.
Produced by Satoshi Takata.
Unrated. Contains a wondrous amount of pleasant rural monotony and one scene of violence.
PET SHOP DAYS. [United Kingdom, Italy, United States, Mexico.]
Every once in a while you come across a movie that is so aggressively inept that you have no choice but to sit in awe of it. Pet Shop Days is the directorial debut of Olmo Schnabel, son of Julian, and as first outings go, it smacks of the cockiness that often accompanies someone who grew up in the shadow of a consequential artist. His movie features two emotionally fraught father-son relationships, so there’s probably something to glean from what Schnabel is saying about growing up rich in this cruel modern world. I promise you won’t care.
The film, a disorienting slog that aims for the brutal urbanity of The Safdies but has more in common with the work of Vitaliy Versace, follows Alejandro (Darío Yazbek Bernal), a spoiled-putrid rich kid whose belligerent tantrums put people in hospitals and keeps the film in a perpetual state of glazed psychosis. His most recent frenzy sends him lamming it from his family’s palatial Mexican estate to New York City, where he hooks up with another rich kid named Jack (Jack Irv, who shares a co-writing credit). Jack works at the eponymous pet shop, which doesn’t fit into the story so much as tangentially exists in it, but it’s there where Jack and Alejandro begin their doomed love affair. They indulge in small-time heists and bisexual threesomes, which frequently spin out into random violence and screaming. If it helps, I’ll throw out a hacky X meets Y: think The Bling Ring meets The Room.
What follows is a string of loosely assembled scenes — stuffed with an insane amount of A-list ringers — where Bernal constantly casts unhinged meerkat looks and Jack looks like he could do with a good nap. The performances are uniformly bad (Willem Dafoe, consummate professional that he is, makes do with grim material), but Bernal and Irv are left so far adrift that it feels like someone is playing a cruel prank on them. But the most frustrating aspect of Pet Shop Days is how it’s being presented as a daring LGBTQ-positive film; as it plays out, you get the impression that it doesn’t hold a very high opinion of bisexuals, considering how fickle, confused, and lost those who identify as such are depicted. In Pet Shop Days, it’s just a phase one can opt out of.
1.5 out of 10
Directed by Olmo Schnabel.
Written by Jack Irv, Olmo Schnabel, and Galen Core.
Cinematography by Hunter Zimny.
Starring Darío Yazbek Bernal, Jack Irv, Willem Dafoe, Maribel Verdú, and Peter Sarsgaard.
Produced by Martin Scorsese, Francesco Melzi d’Eril, Gabriele Moratti, Olmo Schnabel, Galen Core, Marie Savare de Laitre, and Alex Coco.
Unrated. Contains copious amounts of sex, drugs, and poop.
Our CIFF 2023 coverage continues all week.
More CIFF 2023 Reviews:
Reviewed: Anatomy of a Fall, The Hypnosis
Reviewed: The Boy and the Heron, Dream Scenario
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