Seriousness Sensationalized: Marczak Uses a Father in Turmoil to Showcase His Style
The winding, seemingly endless Vistula River, the longest in Poland (and ninth longest in Europe) is at the centre of Michał Marczak’s brooding doc Closure. Following a father caught in the limbo between grief and hope, Daniel trudges up and down the Vistula every day until days turns into months and then years to locate his missing 16 year-old son Krzysztof (who also goes by Chris). He vanished after walking to a looming bridge over the river, maybe he jumped? There’s no trail or evidence and Daniel doesn’t think he’s that way inclined. Stamped as a documentary that is more art-house mediation, the artifice of the filmmaker’s stylish choices to shoot the film like fiction devalues the emotion at the heart of this tragic story of not knowing.
Daniel himself is an admirable man, taking matters into his own hands in the face of an impossible situation. Marczak fills much of the runtime with side profile shots of Daniel looking at a loss, panning to the vast landscape surrounding him. Revisiting this setup several times causes its profundity to feel lost and unnatural. In Daniel’s home his wife encourages him to focus on what he can control, he’s neglecting her emotionally and physically in their home. The camera lingers like a specter but we do not learn enough about Daniel’s wife beyond their current situation despite glimmers of her coming through amongst the anguish.
On paper, Marczak’s commitment to Daniel and the missing person’s case as time passes is admirable but even when there is consent and comfort between filmmaker and subject it still somehow feels exploitative. The global average suicide rate for adolescents aged fifteen to nineteen is approximately one in fifteen thousand, and while the documentary gestures toward possible explanations, these ideas remain peripheral—tapping at the glass rather than fully entering the frame.
There are anonymous tips claiming to have seen Chris which only reminds viewers that we are in an age of heavy media overlaps and a well documented current obsession comes from everyday internet sleuths for missing person cases. We are reminded of the age gap between father and son – like any teenage boy Chris was in the midst of girl crushes, he used TikTok – it creates a digital and very real chasm between them. Daniel scrolls down his son’s social media handles for clues, unable to decipher any of the algorithmic language he would be fluent in. Each added theme comes and goes like his speedboat in the river searching for meaning but being dragged down to the murky bed.
Marczak is clearly a talented filmmaker, but his instincts seem better suited to narrative than documentary; his eagerness to flourish prevents a true marriage between form and direction. The constant downtempo score that sounds like we are approaching an evil lair shovels the idea of misery further down the river’s mouth and rarely stops. The “closure” promised by the film’s title is beside the point, and ultimately it does not matter whether the audience attains it or not.
But Daniel’s reality feels fragile and you wonder if he’ll look back on Closure with any fondness in years to come. Marczak’s previous docu All These Sleepless Nights is similarly loose in structure yet more bold in execution and in this instance, the subject seems better suited to an avant-garde fiction approach than a gritty documentary.
Reviewed on January 28th – 2026 Sundance Film Festival (41st edition) – World Cinema Documentary Competition section. 108 mins.
★★/☆☆☆☆☆
