Closure

Transcending true-crime cliché, this masterful study of obsession documents a father’s quest for answers in the wake of his teenage son’s disappearance.

The last-known footage of 16-year-old Krzysztof Dymiński – “Chris” to his friends – was captured in the early hours of the morning in May 2023 on CCTV: he is seen standing on a bridge overlooking Warsaw’s Vistula River; the camera pans away and back, and Chris is gone. One year on, little hope remains that Chris is still alive, but his father Daniel pours his immense grief into the task of at least filling in the narrative blanks. He trawls his son’s social media profiles and the river itself for clues, increasingly consumed by his search.

Bringing a steady, sensitive gaze to this heart-rending material, director Michał Marczak withholds archival material of Chris in favour of a present-tense approach grounded in his absence. As in his previous film, the 2016 raver-romance docufiction All These Sleepless Nights, Marczak’s prodigious cinematography gives Daniel’s dogged pursuit an uncanny resemblance to fiction. Premiering at Sundance and winning the top prize at the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, Closure makes for uneasy but spellbinding viewing.

Content: Melbourne International Film Festival