Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter (2015)

Though the premise is great, nothing about this movie delivered.

Kumiko, a Tokyo secretary, is weird. She doesn’t have friends or social skills. She’s older than everyone else at work because, as her boss points out, being an “office lady” is a job for the young. By age 29, she should be climbing the ladder or getting married. Instead, she’s frowning her way through life, feeding her bunny ramen and watching her VHS copy of Fargo so that she can figure out where, exactly, a case of money that is shown being buried in snow during the movie is. So, I guess she's less weird and more "not all there."

If I had been given any way to identify with Kumiko, that would’ve been helpful. But she’s joyless. Her belief in the “This is a True Story” blurb at the beginning of the movie Fargo is less a result of excited innocence than of sullen insistence. How was this person navigating life and paying bills when she can’t even use the internet to find out that Fargo isn’t real? She doesn’t come across as a childlike, she comes off as a downer without basic reasoning ability.

D-