Closure Review | Desperately Tragic, Nerve-Racking Doc Walks Between Hoping And Grieving

Late in the startlingly intense Closure, the disconsolate father at the centre confesses, “No one teaches families how to live.” This single statement gleans the inevitable reckoning propping the film’s agonising central journey. Premiering in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at Sundance, Michal Marczak’s Polish-language doc channels a hapless, helpless pursuit of a missing son into a mournful meditation on the unknowable distance between ourselves. In 2023, the 16-year-old Krysztof, or “Chris,” walked out of his home at 4 AM, took a bus to Warsaw, got onto a bridge across the mighty Vistula river, waited and vanished, when a rotating CCTV camera tracked back. Ever since, his father Daniel has been consumed in untangling his disappearance. Days looped into months, yet no concrete leads surfaced.

Chris left no clues behind. The family says they gauged no sign of Chris having mental distress. Everything seemingly pointed to perfectly functional circumstances. Otherwise, for Chris to escape home as adolescent rebellion, without a word to anyone, even friends, is too far-fetched. There’s nothing quantifiable for the parents to peg the disappearance to. It crunches the act of letting go harder, stretching it endlessly into the most grotesque quandary. Even an incidental guess suggests where Closure is headed, but incredibly, Marczak keeps us in a tight, queasy knot. In Closure, Marczak has honed something nakedly honest and emotionally confronting. It’s to wander through our innermost haunted recesses. Numerous red herrings of Chris being sighted propel Daniel on an increasingly forlorn path. It’s a string of deceptions that goad the father to keep looking. Something must surely turn up. We sit in apprehension and disquiet, as grief and loss hollow out a man so irrevocably that he might soon be left with nothing. His strife is with whether he should keep looking or quit and devote himself to his family. But wouldn’t this quitting be an act of betrayal, giving up on Chris? How should he tread between regret and certitude in moving on?

Daniel keeps returning to the river, trawling its depths as far as conceivable. When Daniel’s father worriedly remarks about him soon tipping over the line where only the river would remain of significance in his life, others counter he might be there already. When loss pushes you to the edge, how do you make your way back to love, sanity, the residues of family? Closure is about the long road healing takes, pockmarked with guilt, hesitation and remorse. Marczak, who’s also shot the film, bobs the camera along the water, even ramming into its depths. Each time the camera scans the waters, you can feel your stomach anxiously perched on dropping

Marczak frames the Vistula as a mirror to Daniel’s great internal churn. Daniel can be pacified only by the shape of certain solid answers; but they remain elusive, thwarting his best, prolonged efforts. The river can be surging, menacing, overwhelming and yet also a strange site of consolation. In its midst, Daniel experiences the utter gamut of processing his grief. On its banks, in its bosom, he jousts with painful rites of release. He waives off and fights bereavement, determinedly siding with hope. This gnarled anticipation suspends him in a purgatory of waiting and searching. Real life, other loved ones including his other son Patryk and wife Agnieszka, cease to matter, dissolving into the distance.

Closure is full of remarkably audacious choices in its focusing and deflection, in what it centres and how it narrows deep into the soul. Marczak foregrounds no photos of Chris nor wades into his school avatar. Even his social media presence is just about whisked through. The film is disinterested in whittling those tunnels which otherwise inundate the standard missing-person film. Marczak takes a more spiritually probing approach, guiding us through obsessions almost garbled beyond rescue. Daniel’s perspective, the degree of his awareness about Chris anchors the documentary. Closure insists there’s only so much Daniel can access now. It’s only much later that the film circles the isolation of the young exacerbated by being on the internet. In such a world, how intimate can the parent-child relationship possibly be? What do we do to render greater faith in communication?

Attributed to four composers, Closure’s score is integral to its all-encompassing effects. It swerves between ominous and wrenching, cranking an atmosphere of gloom and terror about to break through. It’s an ugly, discomfiting sensation that grabs us tight and stubborn, demanding we listen more acutely to those whom we think we know.

Debanjan Dhar is covering the 2026 Sundance Film Festival as part of the accredited press.