(Check out Chris Reed’s Closure movie, it’s in theaters now. Seen it? Join the conversation with HtN on our Letterboxd Page.)
Polish director Michał Marczak (All These Sleepless Nights) makes films that explore the intersection of documentary and narrative, employing the art and craft of the latter to illuminate the nonfiction realities of the former. In Closure, his latest, he trains the camera on a family going through the worst possible experience: the loss of a child. And yet this is no exercise in misery porn but rather a poignant meditation on grief and its aftermath.
The movie opens with a body. OK, it’s a dummy. Yet it is meant to replicate the journey of a missing teenager who may have jumped off a bridge into the Vistula River, which flows through Warsaw, Poland’s capital. The man throwing the fake corpse into the water is Daniel, the father of that boy, Chris (Krzysztof). It’s been over a year since his son vanished into seeming thin air. The last time he was seen alive was on this very bridge. After that, nothing.
Daniel is married, to Agnieszka, and has another son, Patryk, yet is single-mindedly focused on hunting for clues to Chris’ whereabouts. Dad and mom pore over every potentially relevant news story and listen to every phoned-in tip, grasping at the ever-vanishing straws of hope. And day after day, Daniel and friends (and, occasionally, Daniel’s own aging father) go out on the Vistula, trawling for anything that might shed light on what happened.
It’s a very sad story, beautifully photographed. A man of some means—he muses to the director that he spent too much time earning money and not enough time with Chris—Daniel spares no expense in his equipment purchases, whether it’s waterproof cameras, GPS trackers, and more. But as we approach the two-year anniversary of Chris’ disappearance, he still has no answers.
Often, however, actions can have unintended consequences. Here, the high-profile nature of the journalistic coverage afforded the family leads relatives of other vanished teens to contact Daniel. If he can’t solve his own mystery, perhaps he can help them solve theirs. It’s a bittersweet development, but still something.
Closure provides no easy answers to the central riddle yet still satisfies—morally and cinematically—in the way it allows Daniel to speak his own truth and, slowly, to heal in his own fashion (even if the wound remains open). Through heart-to-heart conversations between Marczak (behind the camera) and Daniel, as well as between Daniel and various others, the movie delivers an unexpected, affecting catharsis. May we all be lucky enough to find even this kind of closure in moments of tragedy.
– Christopher Llewellyn Reed (@ChrisReedFilm)
