Likely many reading this have already seen Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist, which is more than a month into a theatrical run. It’s only now that Eiko Ishibashi’s magnificent score’s been released, but timeliness is not much issue when, à la Drive My Car, this functions wonderfully as a standalone project––a sadder, harsher, even scarier composition this time around, and an evocation of Evil‘s superb sister film Gift.
I was fortunate to speak with Ishibashi about both films and their shared sounds last month. As she told me, “I think, in terms of the characteristics of this work, it’s actually quite different from Drive My Car. In the case of that film, you have the main character and it’s very clear what they’re feeling––this actually controls the film in a large way. However, when you talk about this project, the set-up is really: you have the nature and the people who are living in it. It’s not really a sense of trying to get close to something or not––in terms of making the music it was the same––but in terms of emphasizing the characters’ feelings or not. In this case it was more about the emotions are throughout the whole film, which I think might have made a larger impression or influence.”
Stream the soundtrack below or (better yet) buy it from Ishibashi’s Bandcamp: