In the rural alpine hamlet of Mizubiki, not far from Tokyo, Takumi and his daughter, Hana, lead a modest life gathering water, wood, and wild wasabi for the local udon restaurant. Like generations before them, they live a modest life according to the cycles and order of nature. Increasingly, the townsfolk become aware of a talent agency’s plan to build an opulent glamping site nearby, offering city residents a comfortable “escape” to the snowy wilderness. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s follow up to his Academy Award-winning Drive My Car is a foreboding fable on humanity’s mysterious, mystical relationship with nature. As sinister gunshots echo from the forest, both the locals and representatives confront their life choices and the haunting consequences they have.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist begins, ends, and breathes with music. Composer Eiko Ishibashi’s lushly beautiful score seems to grow like the trees surrounding the rural hamlet outside Tokyo where the story takes place; it’s a character in the film, revealing beauty to us, warning us of danger, immersing us in its world. Hamaguchi originally began this project as footage to accompany one of Ishibashi’s live performances. It became a narrative feature film, one born of music rather than the other way around, and you sense that while watching it — the score seems to drive the plot, in an ever-surprising ride.

There’s a turning point in the story when one of the company reps — Takahashi, played by the actor Ryûji Kosaka — seems to fall under the spell of this wooded region and even fantasizes about moving here. For a while it looks like the movie might be the story of a city mouse turning country mouse. But nothing about Evil Does Not Exist turns out to be predictable. As he’s done before, Hamaguchi gives us characters who are too complicated and richly drawn to be reduced to any one type. Yet that doesn’t explain how hauntingly different this movie feels from his other work.

Evil Does Not Exist is about how water flows downhill, relentlessly and forever, creating its own song. It’s about how the indigo darkness of a forest at night becomes a blanket, and about how the arrival of strangers can change a place (or change the strangers), and about the idea of something precious being forever lost. And it’s about that glorious music, soaring and twisting and sometimes suddenly dropping away, cruelly and abruptly; you miss it when it’s gone. unbelievably powerful fable about conservation and mankind’s destructive relationship with nature. We’re all visitors, we’re all forces that disrupt and destroy even when we mean well. When nature revolts against that, it’s not from malice or evil. It’s simply what it is. The law of the land. With Yoshio Kitagawa’s exquisite cinematography and Eiko Ishibashi’s rapturous score, Evil Does Not Exist is yet another delicate, gentle picture from Hamaguchi that contains tidal waves of emotion underneath the surface waiting to crack through and overpower you.