Closure

When 16-year-old Chris goes missing, his father Daniel throws himself into an all-consuming search along the Vistula River. Chris was last seen on camera footage of a bridge near Warsaw. After that, there are only questions: Did he jump off? Did he run away?

Immersed in Daniel’s search, filmmaker Michał Marczak follows the father closely, capturing him combing the river, month after month, suspended between hope and fear. Remaining well clear of the true crime genre, the film focuses not on solving the mystery of Chris’s disappearance, but on Daniel and his family’s struggle to live with the uncertainty of not knowing what happened.

The search takes an unexpected turn as Daniel begins helping other families with missing loved ones find answers – and, at times, the closure that continues to elude him. Meanwhile, he builds increasingly inventive tools to search the river: boats, drones, and underwater cameras. Marczak continues to explore the boundaries of nonfiction, moving from the partly staged approach of All These Sleepless Nights (2016) to the immersive filmmaking of Closure, where striking cinematography and richly textured sound give Daniel’s search the tension of a thriller.