A Father’s Relentless Search Haunts ‘Closure’

While a couple of months remain in the year, it seems safe to say that 2026, as regards cinema, has been the year of the documentary. From buzzed-about and commercially successful titles like “You Can See Everything” and “Melania” to controversial exposés such as “Musk,” multiple documentaries have become a part of the national conversation, reaching beyond niche theaters to a wider audience. Docs with smaller profiles have also made an impression, with films like “One in a Million” and “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie” enjoying nearly unanimous critical praise. This week sees the arrival of another powerful real-life narrative, “Closure,” about a father looking for his missing teenage son in Poland. Having premiered in January at the Sundance Film Festival and just been nominated for a Gotham Award, it opens at the IFC Center before a national rollout. A mournful meditation on disappearance and grief, the occasionally plodding documentary might not be for every moviegoer. For the most part, though, its portrayal of a confounded-if-determined dad cuts to the quick as it follows him on his search. Combining a cinema vérité approach with expressionist touches, director Michał Marczak crafts a unique feature suffused with both unanswered questions and elliptical, existential inquiries. The film begins almost like a nature adventure documentary, complete with drone imagery of the impressive Vistula River, visceral moments aboard a small boat, underwater shots, and overactive sound design. Soon, though, a body is found near an inlet and we come to realize that one of the two men on the boat, Daniel, is searching for his son, Chris. The corpse turns out not to be the boy’s, but this opening sequence establishes a dread that will drift throughout the doc. Intermittently, this dread occasionally gives way into observational stupor, repetition, and affectedly discreet framing, yet overall the tone will complement Mr. Marczak’s alternately direct and arty style, as well as the seriousness of the subject matter. The facts of the case are soon explained: 16-year-old Chris left his suburban home early one morning and took a long trip via public transport to Warsaw, where CCTV caught him standing on a bridge for 20 minutes before vanishing once the camera turned to another angle. The central question is whether he jumped into the river or walked off the bridge without a trace. The boy’s mother and best friend don’t believe him to be the kind of person who would take his own life. Daniel is more ambivalent, particularly when alluding to his son’s unrequited love and spending much of the film searching along the river, which takes up the bulk of the film. On sunny days and rainy ones, freezing nights and foggy mornings, we see Daniel on the Vistula or its shoreline in his endless search. (If Chris drowned, his father reasons that the body may be stuck underwater by the river’s mud and detritus, or have floated nearly a hundred miles away to a reservoir.) One haunting scene finds the father and his father slowly being swallowed by thick fog while on the boat, with both senses of the word “lost” hanging in the air. Indeed, Daniel acknowledges how he’s consumed with the search and how he should focus on the family he still has. Yet self-awareness doesn’t prevent him from trying out various DIY devices and methods to locate clues or his son’s body, including a pole-mounted underwater camera, a small submersible, and tools for raking the dirt and sand of the riverbed. After hearing of an old custom for finding bodies in the river, he even drops loaves of bread into the waterway in the hopes they will lead him to Chris, though he involves modern technology by inserting trackers within them. We shortly learn that wild boars may have eaten the bread.Although Mr. Marczak is never seen in the film, his presence is heard in the questions he poses to Daniel, and in the inordinate proximity of some close-ups. At times, this intimacy is a result of a one-man film crew, with the director often shooting from inside Daniel’s boat (instead of from another vessel) and carrying all the needed film equipment. In other scenes, we can sense how the camaraderie developing between the two is due to the time spent in each other’s company, with the desolate dad growing comfortable with this shadow with a movie camera. Still, a certain remove exists between them, and the filmmaker allows this distance to suggest words left unsaid in the father’s relationship with his son. At one point, the director even prompts him to look at Chris’s TikTok reposts, and the father is clearly disturbed by some of them, including a clip from the movie “American Psycho” in which Willem Dafoe and Christian Bale’s characters discuss how people can “just disappear.”As the doc progresses over a timespan of a year or so, Daniel does open up a few times, such as when he expresses remorse over working too much or when he talks up the beauty of nature. Some of these moments lead one to wonder if his dogged pursuit has an element of midlife crisis to it. Scenes in the family home find him either exhausted and listless or doing search-related work. When his wife and other family members ask him when he will give up, a faraway gaze crosses his face, suggesting that stopping would mean accepting the possibility that all his efforts have been Sisyphean — all for naught.In the film’s back half, another father whose child is missing and feared drowned is introduced. This section creates a heightened apprehension as Daniel assists in the search while also providing the documentary with a kind of culmination and muted catharsis. What I will remember most is how Mr. Marczak turns the camera away at pivotal moments, respecting the sanctity of devastation. It is this delicacy—one might even call it detachment—that makes “Closure” an unforgettable experience, exploring the subject of ambiguous loss with careful, artful sensitivity.

A Father’s Relentless Search Haunts ‘Closure’

A Father’s Relentless Search Haunts ‘Closure’

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