At around 4 am on May 27th, 2023, 16-year-old Krzysztof “Chris” Dymiński snuck out of his family home in Ożarów Mazowiecki, hopped on a bus to Warsaw, and walked to the center of the Gdański Bridge, above the Vistula River. He was captured on a rotating CCTV camera, standing motionless, staring at the water below for about 20 minutes. The camera swiveled away and back within 3 minutes, and the boy was gone, never to be seen again.

In that brief time, he could’ve leapt into the river, walked away, or been picked up by someone. There’s no proof he did any of this, so his father, Daniel Dymiński has spent countless hours searching for him, much of them scouring the Vistula river. “Closure” is a documentary that follows Daniel as he vacillates between fear and hope in his attempt to find answers and, possibly, closure.

It’s hard to have such closure without seeing your son’s body, be it alive and standing in front of you, or dead and on a morgue slab. To this date, Daniel and his wife, Agnieska Dymiński, haven’t experienced either.

Polish filmmaker Michał Marczak learned about the family’s plight while scouting locations for a fiction film he and his wife/producer Karolina Marczak were working on. The director was on the Vistuala one afternoon when he met Daniel, who was navigating the river in a hi-tech boat equipped with sonar and a drone. This piqued Marczak’s curiosity, and he soon learned over a campfire what Daniel was doing out there. After that, Marczak decided that he and his crew would join Daniel to help him search for his son while documenting the entire journey. In doing so, Marczak has captured the emotional toll and attention the Dymiński family received as media coverage of their exhaustive search spread.

As “Closure” begins, we find Daniel on the bridge where Chris was last seen, fashioning a headless dummy about his son’s weight. He will drop it into the river to follow its trajectory and reenact how his son’s body would’ve floated. While it’s been over a year since anyone heard from his son, Daniel has remained steadfast in his regular trips on the winding river. Marczak captures Daniel and everyone else in the film, including the river, as if they are characters in a narrative feature. Most of the time, it’s easy to forget that this is a documentary because Marczak knows how captivating this story is. When not in a wetsuit and waders in the dense river, Daniel can be seen accessing Chris’s online life, revealing a different side of his son, including viral videos and interactions with peers. The hard part of discovering all that is that it doesn’t really yield any real clues about Chris’s motivation on the day he left or his plans.

It’s established that the family believed Chris was a content young man, but we know that teens can lead double lives nowadays, especially with their access to social media. It’s one thing to choose to run away, and another thing entirely to think your child could consider suicide. A look through his bedroom shows Chris’s affinity for Star Wars, like any other kid. But, we also learn that he had an unrequited crush on a girl from school. Could that have led to his disappearance? There was a three-word farewell on Instagram posted by Chris in the hours before he went missing (“Thank you, goodbye”), but even if Daniel saw it then, what could he make of it or do about it?

By staying close to Daniel, “Closure” ignores the conventions we expect in a missing-person or true-crime documentary. We don’t hear from his teachers, neighbors, or friends, and there are no home video clips that would disclose Chris’s personality. We learn about Chris through the reflections and conversations from Daniel and Agnieska. Marczak’s first documentary since 2016’s “All These Sleepless Nights” focuses more on the daily lives of those left behind when a loved one disappears than on offering any solution.

There are moments in “Closure” when it feels like we’re watching an unsettling, suspenseful thriller, especially when the possibility of hope seems within reach. This feels especially real when Daniel and his volunteers find other bodies or human bones. The fact that none of these are Chris’s remains is reassuring, but it also deepens the heartbreak of not knowing and makes you wonder what kind of stories this river has to tell.

The way in which Marczak captures the process of searching the river is compelling and immersive. The camera often treads water as a human would, and other times dives deep into the murky water, often giving the sense of desperation or hopelessness. It’s a feeling that Daniel knows all too well, and later on in the documentary, he offers another grief-stricken parent in the same situation his time and space. It’s hard to provide any reassurance to anyone else in his situation, but he can listen and be relatable.

Do we want Daniel to find his son’s dead body? If he doesn’t, would that mean that he’s still alive somewhere? Which one is the better outcome? How long can one hold on to such hope?

So many questions follow “Closure”, long after viewing. I don’t know if it will be one of the best documentaries of the year, but it’s definitely one of the most memorable I’ve seen out of Sundance.

RATING: ***1/2