Filmmaker Michał Marczak carves out a unique space for his documentary “Closure” within the non-fiction world. The film is set up as a moody mystery about a teenager who disappears one day and his father’s relentless search for him. Yet as it unfolds it cleverly becomes a drama that tries to answer the bigger life questions about family relationships and love. This might sound lofty, but it is actually what this potent humanist film accomplishes. With a standout central protagonist and an urgent quest that is every parent’s nightmare, the film plays like a thriller but manages to deliver honest and piercing emotions at almost every sequence along the way.
“Closure” starts off with a foreboding scene set along the Vistula river in Warsaw. A man throws a dummy off the bridge into the river, then the camera moves along the heavy currents of the brown water as the same man tries to find the body. This is Daniel, recreating a scenario in which his 16-year-old son Chris threw himself into the river. He’s searching for him and hoping that by recreating this jump, something he isn’t sure even happened, he can find answers.
Chris disappeared one early morning and CCTV footage showed him getting to the bridge. That’s where it ends. Did he jump, taking his own life? Or did he walk back away from the bridge? For months Daniel and his wife Agnieszka have been living in debilitating limbo, hoping that Chris is still alive and will appear back in their lives one day soon. At the same time, Daniel takes matters into his own hands and starts to search the river for his son’s body. While the case is being handled by the police and has been reported in the local media, leading many to join in the search, Daniel’s dogged pursuit becomes his passionate obsession, and he dedicates most of his time to it.
In Daniel, Marczak found an absolutely spellbinding protagonist. Like a Shakespearean grand character, he is haunted by ghosts of his past while pursuing an almost impossible endeavor in his present. He is always questioning himself, examining his memory for clues of what could have happened to make Chris leave and what he may have missed. Marczak, who shot the film himself, keeps the camera close to Daniel’s face so that the audience is privy to every flicker of emotion and every sign of hope. Marczak captures Daniel in silent despair with his wife Agnieszka, as the parents can’t bring themselves to accept that Chris may never return. Yet Agnieszka also wishes for an end, whatever it may be. In that liminal space, Marczak gives the audience a complete narrative of a family in turmoil and a man conflicted. His probing sensitive camera makes this story utterly palpable. As as the cycle of hope and despair keeps being repeated with hopeful clues that amount to nothing, the audience is engulfed along with the parents into their nightmare.
Perhaps most perceptively captivating is the sweetly cunning way Marczak inserts himself into the film. He’s never seen on camera, but his voice is heard probing Daniel to open up and talk about how he is feeling. In these compassionate scenes, “Closure” takes flight and arrives at something resembling its title. Or as close to it as can be in the circumstances. Daniel tries to make sense of losing Chris, and in these conversations he opens up to Marczak, and by extension everyone watching, about what he’s learned and what it will mean for his life with Agnieszka and his other son, Patryk. He arrives at a poignant realization that maybe life is about people helping each other, like he failed to help Chris. Complementing this emotional catharsis is Marczak’s breathtaking cinematography. He plays with light and frame to express melancholy mood. The camera roves around as it follows Daniel in the river under the dense unforgiving water, on the road and into the surrounding forest as the search continues.
“Closure” never pretends to be about solving the mystery of a son’s disappearance — instead, it considers the unbearable weight of not finding an answer. Marczak refuses easy answers or narrative release, and that restraint is precisely what makes the film so devastatingly honest. Yet somehow at the same time Daniel, his family and the audience arrive at a complete and moving narrative by the time the film ends.
English (US) ·