Sundance ‘26: ‘CLOSURE’ Is an Electrifying, Devastating Search for Meaning in Loss

Shot with cinematic flair, Michał Marczak’s Polish-language documentary Closure is a rattling search and rescue: both for an actual missing kid and the soul of the father searching. Following the disappearance of his teenage son Chris, Daniel diligently scours the Vistula River, hoping to either recover his son’s corpse or uncover some hint that he might still be alive. He and his friends spend their free time checking every creek and crag of the Vistula, mucking out the eddies, breaking apart wash-ups, and scouring its embankments for a decomposing body. In the opening scene, Daniel finds what he’s looking for: a corpse washed up on the riverbank. Fortunately, it’s not his son. Closure eludes him still.

Marczak’s filmmaking is immersive, gonzo cinematic journalism. Shot with a mix of sweeping overhead drone shots and tight face-closeups that capture the rivers of emotion brewing across each face, Closure feels like a movie in the best sense. The cinematography is haunting and evocative, and Marczak avoids traditional talking-head retrospectives in favor of a more immediate, lived-in naturalism.

Chris’s disappearance is driven by mystery: what most believe to be an apparent suicide doesn’t make sense to his family or friends. He just wasn’t that guy. He wasn’t depressed. He was recently in love. He didn’t leave a note. As much as Daniel is searching for a body, he’s really searching for understanding — for closure. Reported sightings of Chris, wandering the countryside like a vagrant, only complicate matters. Questions of police competence further obscure the truth.

Daniel leans into an adage: “Who doesn’t search, doesn’t find.” But at what point does his quest tip from diligence to obsession? Is 18 months not enough to clear the conscience of having pursued every avenue? When does the search for a lost son become a surrender of the living family? What is the meaning in all this loss? The point in tragedy? The immensity and solitude of Daniel’s grief feels insurmountable. His all-consuming search becomes his entire identity. Closure circles these questions with poignant proximity, gnawing at the grief of a family caught in a grey purgatory. They don’t know if they should be mourning, but they can’t stop hoping. The uncertainty, for Daniel, is exhausting.

Closure is my favorite kind of documentary: raw, intimate human emotion, philosophically exploratory, dripping with suspense, and backed by an eerie score that could be lifted straight out of a horror movie. And if the score evokes horror, the Vistula is its monster: hungry, unyielding, intimidating. But it’s also becomes a place of quiet beauty and solitude, where Daniel briefly steps away from life’s pressures to become one with nature, grim mission notwithstanding. As Daniel and his crew’s search soldiers on, each ping of the metal detector signals a kind of dour hope. The viewer’s pulse quickens alongside the subjects. Could this be Chris’s final resting place? And what would it mean for Daniel, and for the rest of his family, if it is? But we begin to understand that maybe there’s something beyond just a search for closure. With each day spent out there, Daniel may not move closer to the truth, but he does move closer to peace.

CONCLUSION: Men will literally search every inch of a river before going to therapy. In ‘Closure’, a captivating documentary about a Polish man’s relentless search for his presumed-dead son, that line isn’t just a meme. It’s the devastating truth. Staggering, philosophical, and deeply cinematic, ‘Closure’ is an overwhelming meditation on life, death, and man’s search for meaning.