So spoiler and/or content warning, but homie's kid dies from a wounded deer that lashes out in fear while she's walking home from school unattended. He's late to pick her up because he's helping some people who are trying to put a glamp-ground in town and is acting as a kind of town ambassador, but a) the route home through the woods is relatively safe and b) this is kind of a thing she does because her dad is chronically late regardless of outsiders wasting his time. But like those people also didn't even really want to be there, they were hired by the money guy who's actually trying to do this and they're just some talent agency stooges. They even kind of seem like they're coming around to the town's side, what with my man's new found love of chopping wood and my girl's dipping her hand in that mountain stream that's the center of the controversy.
Overall a very interesting movie in the same subgenre of ambiguously-culpable deaths as Anatomy of a Fall, however instead framing the story around the centerpiece of a trial like in Anatomy, Evil Does Not Exist has a very cathartic 20 minute (apparently, it flew by) town meeting with the aforementioned stooges where they get absolutely torn apart. This was before the stooges get humanized and humanize the townfolk for themselves, so they're at their most smarmy and the cynical punk guy gets in some excellent one-liners. Speaking of long scenes, the first shot is a very long pan of the winter canopy in the forest where they live, and overall the cinematography was really pretty.