Sometimes the movies can be as good at measuring the solitude inside a person as the loneliness outside. “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” is a slow-burner — deadpan and mysterious, funny and sad — about a young Japanese woman obsessed with a pot of gold no one else knows is there. The fact that it doesn’t really exist has no bearing on the matter.
Among other things, David Zellner’s film, written with his brother Nathan, testifies to the power of movies on our imaginations. Kumiko (Rinko Kikuchi) appears to be just another Tokyo “office lady,” charged with menial tasks like making tea and dropping off the boss’s dry cleaning. In her cluttered, cloistered apartment, though, she watches the climactic scene of the 1996 Coen brothers film “Fargo” over and over again on an ancient VHS tape, taking inscrutable notes and making a treasure map in needlepoint. She’s convinced the briefcase full of money that Steve Buscemi’s character buries in a snowy field is actually out there.
As portraits of mental illness go, “Kumiko” is slender but even-handed, neither romanticizing its heroine’s mania nor tipping into melodrama or horror. Mostly it finds sympathy for a woman trapped in a lockstep society while dreaming of being a “Spanish conquistador seeking untold wealth in the Americas.” That’s what she tells a library security guard after she’s caught trying to steal a US road atlas. Something about Kumiko’s intensity bends people to her will; the guard rips out the page for North Dakota and sends her on her way.
Her giggly co-workers and grumbling boss (Nobuyuki Katsube) see Kumiko as a silent weirdo; her mother (Yumiko Hioki), a hectoring voice on the phone, wonders why she hasn’t been promoted or gotten engaged. An early sequence says it all: Kumiko making her way unseen through the Tokyo morning rush, then exchanging her bright red hunter’s cloak for the prim uniform of an office lady. In the cloak, she’s a figure out of myth, but the mythology’s her own.
Kikuchi is a changeling actress, Oscar-nominated as the rebellious deaf teenager of “Babel” (2006), much-loved as future warrior Mako Mori in Guillermo del Toro’s “Pacific Rim” (2013). Here she plays an outwardly frightened, inwardly ferocious character, the hero of an unfolding epic in her head. It’s a testament to the actress’s skill that we see both sides of Kumiko while the other characters see nothing at all.
“Kumiko” is not without humor. The heroine’s pet rabbit, Bunzo, is a silent witness to the drama, and Zellner stages some of the scenes as minimalist farce, Kumiko exiting the frame before unexpectedly popping back in. The movie as a whole takes a quantum leap when she manages to get to America — don’t ask, it wasn’t entirely legal — and comes up against the baffled generosity of Minnesota locals. These include a helpful Christian tourist aide (Nathan Zellner), a chatty widow (Fredrika Dukes) who wants to know if Kumiko has read “Shogun,” and a gentle police officer played by the director himself. As the movie sees it, the New World is the opposite of Kumiko’s Tokyo; it’s a place of boundless horizons, cruel weather, and slightly dented individuality.
At a certain point, the movie and its central figure step off the map entirely, and “Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter” transforms into a snowy parable, one both wondrous and terribly sad. Does she find the treasure? I’m not saying. This is a quiet movie, moving to rhythms of its own, and it’s not for all tastes. If you try it, though, the figure of the Japanese conquistador, her red cloak burning against a field of white, may haunt you for a while to come.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.