Clearing
A young mother disappears on the slopes of the sacred Ślęża mountain, leaving behind a pushchair with her baby. A police officer, a young husband and a retired clairvoyant try to reconstruct the last moments before she vanished. A female police officer with a personal childhood connection to Mount Ślęża stands in for the missing wife.
Summary
“Clearing” (2025) is a haunting mystery drama set around Mount Ślęża, a sacred and atmospheric landscape where the boundaries between reality, memory, and belief begin to blur. The film opens with the disappearance of a young mother on the mountain. Her baby is found abandoned in a pushchair, but there is no clear sign of what happened to her, turning an ordinary family outing into a deeply unsettling investigation. A police officer takes charge of the case, working alongside the missing woman’s young husband and a retired clairvoyant who believes the mountain may hold clues that conventional methods cannot uncover. As they attempt to reconstruct the mother’s final moments, their search becomes as much psychological as procedural. Each brings a different understanding of truth: the officer relies on evidence, the husband on intimate knowledge and emotional recollection, and the clairvoyant on intuition and the unseen forces associated with Ślęża. The investigation is further complicated by the involvement of another female police officer, whose own childhood connection to the mountain gives her an unusual, personal relationship with the case. In some respects, she becomes a stand-in for the missing woman, allowing the story to explore the disappearance not only as a criminal mystery but also as an emotional and symbolic experience. Rather than functioning as a straightforward police thriller, “Clearing” builds its tension through uncertainty and atmosphere. The mountain’s religious and folkloric significance lends the film an eerie, almost dreamlike quality, while the characters’ conflicting accounts suggest that memory can be fragile and truth may depend on perspective. At its center, the film examines grief, parental attachment, guilt, and the desperate human need to impose meaning on an inexplicable loss. It is a slow-burning, enigmatic story about the ways trauma reshapes memory—and about how the search for someone who has vanished can expose the hidden fears and unresolved wounds of those left behind.
