The Treasure Hunter (2025) ‘Thessaloniki Documentary Festival’ Review: Quietly Moving Father-Son Doc Reframes a Dogged Quest

Giacomo Gex’s The Treasure Hunter follows a man’s devotion to the elusive. Circling the story of a father-son duo, the film uses the common ground of their obsession with treasure hunting to pick out personal anxieties, spiritual restlessness, the endless search for something to lift them but which only keeps sinking them further.

This is the tale of wartime loot buried by the Japanese imperial army in the Philippines. It’s attracted countless seekers but in vain. Jack inherits his father’s pursuit of the gold. The Treasure Hunter drills into Jack’s unstinting persistence, the quest belying a single-minded pursuit. The treasure hunt, as Jack comes to realize, formed the bedrock of his bonding with his father.

Gex isn’t so much interested in heart-thumping anticipation of Jack landing the coveted pot as he is in its corralling implications, what propels him to keep going against all odds and the price it demands. Why has he subsumed himself so much in excavations? It’s not something he feels he can plant himself in sporadically as well as extricate easily. The task calls for absolute, rigorous, straining perseverance. But to what ends?

With the film trailing them over a seven-year-span, Jack and his father whittle away millions of dollars into the hunt, even when it increasingly looks wholly dark, unsalvageable at the end of the tunnel. Is there any hope at all? Jack turns away from his family, warding off his kids. He keeps dipping back into his hunt, drawn into his own self-absorbed bubble.

Gex drops the viewer into the cavernous depths in the moment Jack goes plunging through. In the dark caves, burrowing comes with several risks. You’ve to be committed enough to power past doubt and are constantly confronted with timely decisions that make all the difference. When to dig further and when to hold back the chasm holds in itself a world of value. Success teases itself through the gap. It’s a job requiring formidable intuition, precise circumstantial intelligence bulwarked by fearlessness and utter tenacity.

A still from The Treasure Hunter (2025). — A still from “The Treasure Hunter” (2025).

Jack is so consumed by the quest, it shuts him out from his family. It’s an isolating obsession that sucks him in so deeply, inextricably he becomes unavailable to the needs, attention his family seeks. It creates walls between him and them. He’s unmooring himself, drifting into his recesses. The Treasure Hunter unravels across three time periods, the first and the second being most well-etched and expansive.

The cost of Jack’s quest is both financial and emotional. Life, family, all its considerations check out. It doesn’t bode well for his loved ones. Whenever he leans back into it, there’s a rupture within family life. He turns inaccessible, distant. You do wish the film was more attentive to, dwelt deeper on the family rebuilding itself time and again, after Jack’s father or he pause the hunt, the disillusionment of it all impossible to overlook.

Jack keeps himself firmly rooted in the pursuit to attain his father’s affirmation. Gex slowly unpeels the personal subtext powering this singular, all-encompassing obsession. Family history comes to the fore. Had it not been for his parents’ estrangement, his father wouldn’t have been in the Philippines, throwing himself into the scouring. It became a form of catharsis, the digging as the father’s way of remaking life in the wake of emotional churn. The Treasure Hunter grows richer as it delineates the personal map Jack is redrawing.

Aided by Craig Macintosh’s patient, supple editing, the film keeps searching, gently nudging to illuminate the need for love and validation underlying obsession. There’s a simplicity, a sense of humility to the filmmaking juxtaposed with the thrusting desperation, Jack’s want of a stab of light. Gex locates the viewer in his perspective, his heedlessness to the anguish and concern of his family. There’s a helpless alienation pulling him close, as he loses sight of what it was that had first drawn him. The film traces his journey of reckoning with sensitivity and compassionate understanding. Great art gives us access into another mind, rendering what might be opaque, puzzling grounded in pure, sincere motivation. Overall, The Treasure Hunter is a modest, quietly compelling work, mining a personal quest with clarity and gradual, dawning knowledge.