‘Closure’ Review: A Father Obsessively Searches for His Missing Teenage Son in a Powerful Documentary About the Double-Sided Nature of Hope

On the morning of May 27, 2023, 16-year-old Krzysztof Dymiński snuck out of his family home around 4am, took a bus to Warsaw, and walked to the center of the Gdański Bridge that stretches across the Vistula River. A rotating CCTV camera watched him stand there — motionlessly staring at the water — for 20 minutes until it swiveled away. When the camera returned its attention less than a minute later, Krzysztof was gone. No one on Earth has verifiably seen him since. 

A shiv-like final snapshot notwithstanding, no images of Krzysztof — or “Chris,” as he was called by those who knew him — are used in Michał Marczak’s haunting and heartsick new film about his disappearance. No school pictures. No social media. No home videos from happier days, now tinged with the ominousness of a tragedy in the making. “Closure” might affect the posture of a true-crime documentary in its opening minutes (during which Chris’ father, Daniel, hurls a headless dummy off the exact spot of the bridge where his son vanished so that he can follow it downstream with an eye towards finding a body), but Marczak’s long-awaited follow-up to 2016’s “All These Sleepless Nights” is much less interested in solving a mystery than it is in the anguish of letting one go. 

An ultra-immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role that hope can play in delaying them both, “Closure” soon eschews any familiar genre tropes in favor of following Daniel as he obsessively charts — and plumbs — the shores of the Vistula in search of answers. Well, not answers so much as proof of his most logical assumptions. 

As rational as a man can be who spends every day trawling a thin stretch of river for evidence of his son, Daniel seems to know that Chris is dead. His wife, who gently encourages Daniel to focus more of his attention on what’s left of their family (which includes another teenage boy), is prone to floating theories that Chris may have chosen to run away, but such fantasies make even less sense to Daniel than the prospect of their baby committing suicide. Chris was a seemingly happy kid who loved “Star Wars” and had an unrequited crush on a girl from school, and though Daniel continues to plumb his son’s TikTok algorithm for other clues, his son’s internet footprint only appears to reinforce his normalcy. Had Daniel been awake to see the three-word farewell that Chris posted to Instagram in the hours before he went missing (“Thank you, goodbye”), he probably wouldn’t have known what to make of it. 

Daniel’s magical thinking is limited to his gut feeling that he’ll find Chris’ body at any moment, and even that is a self-described cry for help. Over the course of “Closure,” such baseless hope — and the strength of purpose that it instills within Marczak’s desperate protagonist — inevitably begins to seem more like a deliberate way of extending Daniel’s grief than a desperate attempt at resolving it.  While tips of varying credibility pour in on a semi-regular basis (Chris’ disappearance continues to inspire enormous interest across the whole of Poland), and Daniel respectfully chases every lead and “sighting” that comes across his desk, such red herrings are framed as distractions from the comforts of poking around the Vistula with a metal detector. Or stuffing a tracker into a loaf of bread (which is ultimately eaten by a boar). Or modifying a consumer drone into something that resembles a military-grade thermal scanner. 

Like Marczak, whose unusually visceral documentaries continue to showcase his bravura talent as a cinematographer, Daniel is a natural gearhead; glib as it would be to imply that Daniel enjoys this awful excuse to play with his toys, it’s clear that he finds something meditative about the all-consuming search for his son. “Closure” fully devotes itself to replicating that mindset, as the film begins to winnow away its peripheral elements until nothing exists beyond Daniel and the river before him; until the broader framework of its drama (and suspense) have been subsumed into a state of pure reflection. 

Where at first the long and unresolved scenes of Daniel on the water — sometimes alone, but often with a friend, his son, or his own father along for help — are regularly interrupted by cutaways to his life at home, they soon begin to assert a stronger gravity over the story at hand. The effect demands a more active degree of introspection than the average documentary, and Marczak’s unwavering commitment to that endurance test approach has a powerful way of messing with viewer expectations. 

Not a single part of me believed that Daniel would find anything of value, even despite all of the tools at his disposal, and yet my heart skipped a beat every time he dug up a tin can or an old animal bone. Maybe it’s… ? No matter how sad and futile you might think Daniel’s search, “Closure” depicts it with such intensely discomfiting empathy — and tunnel-vision — that you can’t help but appreciate how difficult it would be for him to abandon the hope of finding his son, as Marczak weaponizes traditional documentary structure to whet our appetites for a payoff that will probably never come. To fool us into doubting our most obvious conclusions about how this story will unfold. 

To a certain extent, knowing the ultimate outcome in advance — as in, looking into the case online before watching the documentary — would do nothing to diminish the power of a film that operates almost entirely on emotional logic, or the lack thereof. I only say “almost” because, purely experiential as “Closure” might be, something does happen during its third act that adds some much-needed texture to Daniel’s state of mind. Something that helps to disrupt his self-hating focus on what he could have done differently as a father, or why he should have worked less, and similarly helps Marczak’s film to refocus on Daniel’s purpose even as the documentary begins to make overly broad gestures towards the mental health crisis that continues to plague teenagers in Poland and around the world. 

That aspect is best left unspoiled, but it wouldn’t ruin anything to say that “Closure” more than earns the snippet of William Basinski’s “The Disintegration Loops” that plays over its final scenes. Comprised of tape loop recordings that audibly deteriorate over the course of each track (and were famously completed on the morning of September 11, 2001), Basinski’s masterpiece is the perfect soundtrack for Daniel’s recursive search — a search that eroded his soul with every trip along the Vistula River, but, as a direct consequence of its ceaseless repetition, left behind a lasting and unimaginably meaningful testament to his pain. 

Grade: B+

“Closure” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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