There are many proverbs celebrating hope in different cultures and languages: from “Hope springs eternal” to “Hope is the last thing ever lost”.
But as both Friedrich Nietzsche and Stephen King warned us, hope can also be a dangerous thing, something that can prolong a person’s suffering.
Exactly how excruciating this feeling can be becomes the topic of Closure, the new documentary by Polish director Michal Marczak, which premiered earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival.
At the beginning of the film, we see a man called Daniel throw a dummy off a bridge into the Vistula River to see where the stream takes the “body”. Over a year ago, Daniel’s son Krzysztof, whom everyone calls Chris, stood at this very bridge, those moments captured by a CCTV camera before it turned away.
This was the last confirmed sighting of Chris, who disappeared before the camera turned its focus back to that spot on the bridge. Daniel has spent the following year meticulously searching the river and its banks, looking for something, anything that will allow the family to have some closure, but also harboring hope that Chris hasn’t jumped into the water after all and might still come back one day.
While Marczak’s film may initially present as a true-crime documentary centered around a mystery that remains poignant in Poland, at its very core, it’s an intimate and heartbreaking exploration of grief and the emotional destruction that comes along with not being able to fully experience it. For all Daniel’s constant moving around, as he walks, drives, or sails, there is no moving on here, as this is largely a film about being stuck. Daniel and his family are trapped in a painful limbo where they still can’t achieve what the title of Marczak’s doc promises – closure remains out of reach when there are still so many unknowns, even if logic and experience strongly suggest unpleasant answers to looming questions.
Just like Marczak’s previous documentaries, such as At the Edge of Russia and All These Sleepless Nights, Closure displays an almost shocking level of intimacy; the distance between people on screen and the camera capturing them shortened to the point where it sometimes feels non-existent. While the Polish documentary school is somewhat divided between authors who believe that reality needs to be provoked into revealing itself and those who say it only needs to be observed without any interference on the filmmakers’ part, Marczak seems to be aesthetically aligning with the latter.
In a grand tradition of Krzysztof Kieślowski, who famously believed that the camera in the documentary form holds a moral obligation towards its subject (no matter who or what it is), the authors closely observe Daniel and the ones around him but avert their gaze in the moments that don’t need to be shared with the world. For all the heartbreak of the topic, Closure never resorts to manipulation or exploitation, nor does it feel the need to raise its voice.
There is a lot that’s being left unspoken in between intricate shots of the river that insists on keeping its secrets, just like the ocean of social media content, which Chris used to watch and which Daniel now studies obsessively, hoping that it may contain some clues. It’s in those moments the film expands into something bigger than it already was, painting a quiet but resonant picture of human life where the answers and closure are never guaranteed, and pain too often tends to be silent and hidden, swept by some unforgiving undercurrent that, most of the time, we can’t fully learn to navigate.
The film is now playing in select theaters, via 1-2 Special. Visit the film's official site for locations and showtimes.