Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter

2015 • 104 minutes

About this movie

In this darkly comedic odyssey, Academy Award nominee Rinko Kikuchi (Babel, Pacific Rim) stars as Kumiko, a frustrated Office Lady whose imagination transcends the confines of her mundane life. Kumiko becomes obsessed with a mysterious, battered VHS tape of a popular film she’s mistaken for a documentary, fixating on a scene where a suitcase of stolen cash is buried in the desolate, frozen landscape of North Dakota. Believing this treasure to be real, she leaves behind Tokyo and her beloved rabbit Bunzo to recover it – and finds herself on a dangerous adventure unlike anything she’s seen in the movies. With Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, indie mavericks the Zellner Bros. spin a strangely touching underdog fable, populated by eccentrics and elevated to sonic heights by a Sundance award-winning score from electro-indie outfit The Octopus Project and executive produced by Alexander Payne (The Descendants, Sideways), that will leave audiences rooting for the impossible.

Ratings and reviews

Tale about a depressed young Japanese woman, who lives in a culture that defines a woman's worth by her being able to be married. Kumiko has other plans and follows her fantasy of finding a lost treasure in North Dakota based on a movie - she risks everything to find it. There is NO comedy in this movie. The end.. most appear not to get! Very sad movie.

I really did not care much for this movie. You start watching the movie knowing that the protagonist is doomed from the very beginning. All viewers are in on the secret that there is no treasure, no trunk of money hiding in Fargo from the movie Fargo. I felt that there was no catharsis for the viewer. She ends up in a foreign country and is woefully ill equipped for her adventure; no clothes, no winter jacket, no money, limited English and no real plan. She lived a very sorrowful existence in Japan. She was a single woman, in a dead end job, not respected at work and at an age where she should be married. She has no friends and refuses to interact with old friends. I found myself wondering if she was mentally ill. She certainly seemed depressed. It just was a bit difficult to watch.

If I didn't know the true story behind this movie, it would have all seemed totally strange and pointless. Fortunately, it wasn't widely publicized - so as to keep anyone from directly associating Rinko Kikuchi with a terrible implementation.