Michał Marczak, director of *All These Sleepless Nights*, finally returns with a visceral film that challenges the "true crime" genre.
In the early hours of May 27, 2023, 16-year-old Krzysztof Dymiński snuck out of his family home around 4:00 a.m., took a bus to Warsaw, and walked to the middle of the Gdański Bridge, which spans the Vistula River. A rotating security camera captured him there—motionless, gazing at the water—for 20 minutes, until the device shifted its focus elsewhere. When the camera turned back to that spot less than a minute later, Krzysztof was gone. He has not been seen since.
Director: Michal Marczak
Writer: Michal Marczak
With the exception of one final, razor-sharp image, Michał Marczak’s bleak new film about the disappearance of Krzysztof—known as "Chris" to those close to him—contains no photographs of the boy. There are no school portraits, no traces on social media, and no home videos from happier times—moments that, in retrospect, would now be colored by the looming shadow of an unfolding tragedy. Although *Closure* begins by adopting the guise of a "true crime" documentary—showing Chris’s father, Daniel, tossing a headless mannequin from the very spot on the bridge where his son vanished, in an attempt to track its path downstream and perhaps locate a body—Marczak’s long-awaited new work (following 2016’s *All These Sleepless Nights*) is less concerned with solving a mystery than with exploring the profound anguish of having to let go. "Closure"—a deeply immersive portrait of grief, acceptance, and the role hope plays in delaying both—quickly moves beyond standard genre tropes to focus on Daniel, who obsessively combs the banks of the Vistula River in search of answers. Or, perhaps, not so much answers as evidence to confirm his most logical assumptions.
Within the bounds of rationality possible for a man who spends every day scouring a stretch of the river for any trace of his son, Daniel seems aware that Chris has died. His wife—who gently encourages him to focus more on the family he still has, including another teenage son—tends to suggest the possibility that Chris might have left of his own accord; yet, to Daniel, such fantasies seem even less plausible than the idea that his son died by suicide. Chris was a seemingly happy boy who loved "Star Wars" and was nursing an unrequited crush on a classmate. Although Daniel continues to analyze his son’s TikTok algorithm for clues, the digital trail left behind only confirms that Chris’s life was, by all accounts, normal. Had Daniel been awake to see the three-word farewell message Chris posted on Instagram shortly before disappearing ("Thanks, goodbye"), he likely wouldn't have known how to interpret it.
Daniel’s magical thinking boils down to an intuition that, at any moment, he will find Chris’s body—a hunch he himself describes as a "cry for help." Throughout "Closure," this unfounded hope—and the determination it instills in Marczak’s desperate protagonist—ultimately comes to seem less like a desperate attempt to move past his grief and more like a deliberate way to prolong it. Although leads of varying credibility arrive with some frequency—Chris’s disappearance continues to spark enormous interest throughout Poland—and Daniel treats every clue or "sighting" that reaches him with serious attention, these false leads are merely distractions from what truly brings him solace: scouring the banks of the Vistula with a metal detector, hiding a tracking device inside a loaf of bread (which, as it turns out, ends up being devoured by a wild boar), or modifying a commercial drone into something akin to a military-grade thermal scanner.
Much like Marczak—whose documentaries, marked by an unusually visceral intensity, continue to showcase his extraordinary talent as a cinematographer—Daniel is passionate about technology and gadgets. While it would be simplistic to suggest that Daniel enjoys this grim pretext for playing with his "toys," it is clear that he finds something meditative in the all-consuming search for his son. *Closure* fully commits to replicating that mindset; the film gradually strips away its peripheral elements until nothing remains but Daniel and the river before him, such that the broader framework of his drama—and the suspense surrounding it—is ultimately subsumed into a state of pure reflection.
While the long, unresolved scenes of Daniel in the water—sometimes alone, but often accompanied by a friend, his son, or his own father, who come to assist him—are initially interrupted with some frequency...
Although the long, drawn-out scenes of Daniel in the water—sometimes alone, but often accompanied by a friend, his son, or his own father, who assist him—are frequently interrupted by brief glimpses into his domestic life, they soon begin to exert a more powerful gravitational pull on the unfolding narrative. This effect demands a level of introspection more active than what is typical for a documentary; Marczak’s unwavering commitment to this approach—which functions as a true test of endurance—succeeds in profoundly shifting the viewer’s expectations.
Even though, at first, I found it impossible to believe that Daniel would ever find anything of value—despite having all sorts of tools at his disposal—my heart would skip a beat every time he unearthed a tin can or an old animal bone. Could it be...? No matter how sad or futile Daniel’s search might seem, *Closure* portrays it with such an intensely uncomfortable empathy—and such a singular focus—that one cannot help but grasp how difficult it is for him to abandon the hope of finding his son. Marczak uses the traditional documentary structure as a tool to stoke our desire for a resolution that will likely never come; he prompts us to question our own conclusions—however obvious they may seem—about how this story will unfold.
In a sense, knowing the outcome beforehand—for instance, by having looked up the case online before watching the documentary—does not diminish the impact of a work that is governed almost entirely by emotional logic, or the lack thereof. I say "almost" because, while *Closure* is a purely experiential journey, something occurs in the third act that adds a much-needed texture to Daniel’s state of mind. It is an element that helps break his obsession—tinged with self-loathing—regarding what he might have done differently as a father, or why he should have worked less; at the same time, it allows Marczak’s film to refocus on Daniel’s purpose, even as the documentary begins to point, more broadly, toward the mental health crisis that continues to affect adolescents in Poland and throughout the world.
It is best not to reveal that aspect, though it would hardly be a spoiler to say that *Closure* more than justifies the inclusion of a segment from William Basinski’s *The Disintegration Loops*, which plays during its final scenes. Composed of looped recordings that audibly deteriorate over the course of each piece—and which, as is well known, were completed on the morning of September 11, 2001—Basinski’s masterpiece serves as the perfect soundtrack for Daniel’s recursive quest; a quest that eroded his soul with every journey along the Vistula River, yet which, as a direct consequence of its relentless repetition, left behind an enduring testament of unimaginable significance regarding his pain.
Comments
Post a Comment