We may have just wrapped up Sundance Film Festival 2015, but there are still films from last year awaiting a release. The Zellner brothers’ drama Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter will arrive next month and today the full-length trailer has landed. Inspired by the true story (with largely unsubstantiated details) of a Japanese women who ventured to North Dakota in 2001, it looks to be a beautifully shot drama.
We said in our review, “The Zellner brothers are Sundance darlings, having had several short films and their last two features appear at the festival. This year they are back with Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, their first entry in the official dramatic competition and a film that continues the tradition of their off-kilter brand of dark humor. Featuring a solid performance by Rinko Kikuchi (Pacific Rim, Babel) as the titular Kumiko, the film is a melancholy parable about mental illness. However, there is an uncanny amount of dissonance in this frigid fairy tale about a Japanese woman’s unhealthy obsession with the movie Fargo. Similar in tone to their deadpan Kid-Thing, Kumiko’s journey is oddly paced, aimless in direction and ends up leaving one’s mind in a state of doldrums.”
Check out the new trailer and poster below.
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.
Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter opens on March 18th, 2015.