Avis Metacritic

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Treasure is a curiously inert work, a film that feels as emotionally grey and underlit as its cinematography.

Something has perhaps been lost in the edit. This never quite comes together.

Julia von Heinz’s direction can’t handle the film’s tonal shifts, and the screenplay (co-written by von Heinz and John Quester) centers on two very poorly written leads who clash in ways that are supposed to be comedic but are mostly infuriating.

Alas, the film is an inept, ill-made mess — or as my grandmother would call it, a mishegoss, so muddled and misbegotten it’s hard to perform an evidential postmortem, based strictly on one viewing, of where it all goes wrong.