“Evil Doesn’t Exist” features the most captivating movie scene of the year.

With Henrik Ibsen An enemy of the peoplewhose current Broadway revival was nominated for five Tonys this week, a small-town doctor now played by Succession2011's Jeremy Strong discovers that the natural springs on which the town's livelihood depends are contaminated by waste from the local tannery. As a result, people who travel for days to bathe in the city's waters for health reasons end up getting sick from them. He rushes to print his findings in the local newspaper, but when the newspaper's editor, a self-proclaimed radical, finds out what the doctor's report would mean – namely that the springs would remain closed for years, putting people out of work and them would deprive their work of the income they use to buy his newspapers – he and city leaders agree on an alternative plan of action: a vote on it. Instead of simply presenting the truth to citizens, why not call a public meeting and let them decide whether they want to hear it? The results go exactly as the leaders intend: the doctor is shouted down, branded a traitor and publicly attacked, narrowly escaping with his life. Some time beforehand, the people who will orchestrate the doctor's fate revel in the importance of democracy. Society, they argue, is like a ship and everyone should have a hand on the tiller. It takes an out-of-town visitor, a sailor, to point out the flaw in her analogy: “That wouldn't actually work on a ship at all.”

In theory, a community meeting is inherently democratic, just as the ancient Greeks were. In practice, it's chaotic at best and annoying at worst, a forum for NIMBYs and book banners where more moderate voices are suppressed until they get their way. Sometimes, especially in fiction, there is a lone voice of reason that overwhelms everyone with its mastery of the facts.
But more often, that lone voice ends up like the good doctor, lying trembling on the ground as angry villagers cover him with dirt. Not even The simpsons“Marge persuades the Harold Hill-style traveling salesman who sells his fellow Springfielders the idea of ​​an extremely expensive monorail. “But Main Street is still cracked and broken!” She cries. “I’m sorry, Mom,” Bart replies. “The mob has spoken.”

After gritting my teeth and rolling my eyes at a few such meetings over the past few months, I'm surprised to discover that my favorite scene of the year involves a group of concerned citizens, a PowerPoint presentation, and several dozen folding chairs. The scene in question is by Ryusuke Hamaguchi Evil doesn't existhis follow-up to the Oscar-winning film Drive my car. The film is set in a small Japanese village called Mizubiki, whose tranquil rhythms are in danger of being disrupted when a Tokyo company puts forward a plan to build a luxury campsite in the neighboring forest. Things come to a head at the public forum, where representatives of the company – a talent agency called Playmode that for some reason has chosen glamping – present their proposal to the townspeople for the first time. And for 20 virtually uninterrupted minutes, that's all we see: villagers and potential developers discussing the details of sewage drainage. It's captivating.

Unlike the loud shouting that everyone knows (or witnesses), Hamaguchi's community meeting is virtually free of aggression. A young hothead tries to throw himself out of his seat, but is held back by older, more moderate hands. That doesn't mean it's conflict-free. When the Playmode duo present their plans, the townspeople begin to question them, particularly regarding waste disposal. The capacity of the site's septic tank is being exceeded by the number of people it will serve, and while developers argue that average occupancy will be about half that, city residents see right through them. Any waste that is not processed properly will flow into the city's water supply and pollute the blindingly clear lakes and streams that the camera lingers on elsewhere in the film. The owner of the local udon shop speaks up and says she moved from Tokyo because her noodles taste so good, because that's how the city's water tastes. Change that and your business could dry up overnight.

Mizubiki residents have other objections: the risk of wildfires caused by careless townspeople, especially since developers don't plan to pay for overnight monitoring, and disruption to the migration of local deer. But they keep coming back to the topic of water as the two people from Playmode become more and more confused. This wasn't the topic they were expecting, especially not in such detail, and besides…it seems like these people are right?

The title of Evil doesn't exist may seem a bit heavy-handed, but I think Hamaguchi means it in the most direct way possible. This is not a world where people are naturally one or the other, especially not in a moral sense. They behave out of instinct and drive, out of the pursuit of individual achievement or collective protection. The people at Playmode aren't bad, and their actions have a reason: a post-COVID subsidy from the Japanese government for new construction projects. Perhaps it was well-intentioned and no doubt much needed, but in this case it causes a company with no experience in the field to plan a potentially destructive development in a sensitive area at too short a deadline and on too tight a budget to assess its impact. And the townspeople don't treat them like villains. They argue with calm persistence and rarely raise their voices. The udon shop lady doesn't demand that outsiders keep their hands off her water supply. She just asks.

Maybe it's the unobtrusive self-assurance with which… Evil doesn't existThe community meeting plays out, which is what makes it so compelling. The film trusts us to understand what it's about without increasing the drama or denigrating those who don't know. An enemy of the people also points out the flaws in the system, but his conclusion seems deeply undemocratic. There is the wise man who knows best, the powerful manipulators who look out for their own interests, and the largely invisible mob that the latter faction bends to their will. The doctor may seal his fate by comparing educated men like himself to elegant purebreds and the masses to mangy mutts, but he's not entirely wrong, he's just bad at small-town politics. In Mizubiki, it is the common people who have the most knowledge, but even they act out of self-preservation rather than devotion to a higher principle. Like the wild deer that populate the city's pristine forest, they are peaceful until threatened, and when threatened, there is no telling what they will do.

Maybe after years of watching people turn every public forum into an audition for social media stardom, it's just a balm to see the process working the way it's supposed to, with people arguing for a common goal rather than Just wearing your opponents down a pimple. Life is dramatic enough as it is Is.