Treasure | Telescope Film
Treasure

Treasure

Critic Rating

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User Rating

  • Germany,
  • France,
  • Poland,
  • Belgium,
  • Hungary,
  • United States
  • 2024
  • · 111m

Director Julia von Heinz
Cast Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Zbigniew Zamachowski, Wenanty Nosul, Petra Zieser, Robert Besta
Genre Drama

Set in 1990, this film follows Ruth, a journalist, who takes her father, Edek, to Poland to visit places significant to his childhood. This trip is troubling for Edek, though, as he is a Holocaust survivor, and he sabotages much of it to avoid reliving his trauma.

Stream Treasure

What are critics saying?

67

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

Co-written by John Quester, von Heinz’s script tends to operate more like a wrecking ball than a controlled demolition, but Fry and Dunham endow their scenes with a brick-by-brick specificity that brings their characters to their life — the former in spite of Edek’s general buffoonery, and the latter in spite of the humorlessness that Ruth has developed as a reaction to it.

60

The Independent by Geoffrey Macnab

At times, it plays more like a sitcom than a story about the legacy of the death camps. Thankfully, it still provides probing insight into everything from casual antisemitism to the plague of historical forgetfulness.

60

TheWrap by Ben Croll

The self-contained “Treasure” ambles along on the strength of a fine, self-contained script and two winning performers, without ever reflecting or commenting on the historical weight it sets out to explore.

60

Empire by Alex Godfrey

It’s all a little too lightweight, and not above corniness and sentimentality, but it does earn its little emotional breakthroughs, modest as they are. And the sense of time and place is vivid.

50

Variety by Guy Lodge

A film with heart but no real teeth, the commendable sensitivity of which turns too easily toward the sentimental.

50

Slant Magazine by Seth Katz

Because the casually observational moments of Julia von Heinz’s film are so rich, its thematic contrivance becomes harder to accept.

50

The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg

Whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.

50

Screen Rant by Graeme Guttmann

There are great moments in the quiet of Treasure, the scenes where director Julia von Heinz's camera lingers on a look, an item, or a landscape. But Treasure finds itself stuck in the middle of these tender moments and a heavy-handed way with emotion that has good intentions but doesn't land the same.

50

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

This is a confounding movie. Its pace is leaden, its structure lopsided, and while Dunham and Fry are both first-rate performers, their respective personae — both public and on-screen — are difficult for them to fully transcend.

42

The Film Stage by Christian Gallichio

The exploration of a survivor and their child navigating post-Soviet Poland is, on the surface, compelling, but Treasure doesn’t seem capable of threading the needle between a micro portrait of generational trauma and macro, collective trauma that is omnipresent throughout Poland in this era.