The Surrender

"The Surrender" is a supernatural folklore-horror that centres on a mother-daughter conflict.

Despite its promising premise-a meditation on death, grief, and the unbearable pain of loss-the story never quite fulfils its potential.

The writer-director Julia Max's feature debut reveals a striking eye for visuals and atmosphere. Her aesthetic choices are superb, especially in the film's last moments, where grief tension simmer beneath the surface.

However, when the narrative shifts from family drama to occult ritual, coherence begins to falter. The film descends into a kind of beautiful nonsense, evoking echoes of Hereditary, Talk to Me, A Dark Song, The Babadook, and, more recently, The Shrouds.

Max draws layered performances from her leads. Megan (Colby Minifie) and Barbara (Kate Burton) are emotionally distinct and compelling.

Barbara is cold and resolute in her quest to resurrect her husband Robert (Vaughn Armstrong) after a tormented illness, while Megan wrestles with doubt, torn between empathy and skepticism, burdened by the ongoing pain of watching her father suffer.

The core idea is clear, and there's real potential for emotional impact in its exploration of the truths we're most reluctant to face.

The narrative gaps and tonal inconsistencies are too evident to ignore. The film digs into deep themes but struggles to land with clarity and keep viewers engaged.

There are moments worth honoring, such as how the film plays intriguingly with trauma, hope, and monstrosity-blending psychological horror with gore and body horror elements.

It stirs something compelling, even if the final result feels more like an atmospheric sketch than a fully realised vision.

"The Surrender" doesn't over-explain itself-a refreshing choice in a genre often burdened by exposition. Yet at times, it veers too far into the cryptic, resembling a literal descent into a hellish purgatory, leaving the audience more adrift than intrigued.

Is it a bad film? Absolutely not. It's flawed, but not without merit. Flawed but worthwhile, especially for fans of visually rich, boundary-pushing indie horror.

While "The Surrender" doesn't quite stick the landing, Max's bold vision and confident aesthetic suggest she's a filmmaker to watch.

Horror needs voices like hers-unsettling, ambitious, and willing to take risks.

I strongly believe this movie deserves at least 6/10. Reminds me a lot of 'A Dark Song', which I think is also hugely underrated.

Here's why I liked this movie: 1) Perfect cast and acting. I notice these things. This movie is mostly played by just 2 actresses - and they do a brilliant job. That mom character got me angry like 3 seconds into the movie - too realistic!

2) Great canonical setup. The atmoshere, the ritual, the 'other place' - nicely done!

3) No unreasonable dialogue, no dumb actions (unexplained that is), no childish behavior, story is not driven by some unreasonable or unbelievable desires.

4) Its not drawn-out. Pace is good.

5) Execution, operator work, little CGI, costumes, decorations - production quality is high. I say that considering that Shudder usually produces low budget movies, yet this visually looks on par with any other movies out there. Dare I say it, nowadays many even 50million+ movies tend to look awful, unprofessional. This one on the contrary - delivers quality where it matters. Picture is simply pleasant to watch.

6) Drama is real, life-like, a tragedy, definetely comes from someone who experienced it, otherwise I don't know how they got it to be so precise.

Obviously there are also weak parts: 1) Story. The end is too abrupt. While it leaves room for speculation, it lacks build up, it lacks proper culmination, it lacks revelation. All these things could've been there with just a little push.

2) Horror. I get the grief, I get the manifestation, I know, this story is probably less about plain horror and more about one person's tragedy, and the drama surrounding it, but I'm just such a fan of a horror, I really want some detail to that part too, I want the theme to be explored and/or at least some clues to what exactly is happening. Yeah...

Overall, I was REALLY pleasently surprised.

This movie resonated with me.

But then a bit dissappointed too, I guess.

I understand the pain, all the pain in this one - I can understand all of it to it's depth - and its brilliantly portrayed.

But yet you've also made an attempt to involve more than that into this movie - a horror, a devil, an another world - and I was hoping for more of that. And I was also hoping for a resolution that wouldn't be so silent. The clearly was some room for that, why didn't it happen?!

I went in not expecting much and was very pleasantly surprised. It kept our attention for the entire length of the film, which is something most recent horror movies have been unable to do.

Excellent performances from Colby Minife and Kate Burton. Their chemistry was just right, and both played effortlessly off each other.

The movie was fast paced, the cinematography was beautiful and captivating.

If you liked A Dark Song and Anything For Jackson, you might enjoy this movie. It combines elements of both while retaining some uniqueness.

My only gripe is, much like A Dark Song, the final act was lackluster. The ending was rather abrupt and clunky. It would've been nice to see it fleshed out a little more.

Still, overall, a solid watch.

Caring for their sick father, a woman and his wife try to make sure they're giving him the best chance at getting better which soon starts to take a toll on them both when he passes away and they begin a ritual to bring him back, leading them to a supernatural route they can't return from.

This was a troublesome and somewhat difficult genre effort. When this one works is based almost entirely around the final half, where the ritual is performed and the couple heads off into the other realm to continue their quest. The exploits of the specific ritual and how they're to follow the set of instructions as they do makes for a solid starting point already so that when they realize that part of the process is to go to the other side and retrieve the soul of their father to bring back with them provide not only a great series of visually-impressive tactics and rituals, but also getting off enough storyline motivations for the chilling storyline revelations. The scenes in the other realm, especially involving the naked figures shown suffering the deformed influence of the demonic figures controlling the dimension, create a series of encounters and emotional resolutions that make for a fun enough time here as this one goes along. There are some problems with this one keeping it down, though. The main aspect of this one tends to revolve around the continued usage and pronounced exploration of generational trauma and grieving between family members, which is inherently clichéd and just bland to sit through. The idea of going through the process of looking into the family history of their dead patriarch and trying to reconcile who he was and what their relationships with him were like carries on from the very beginning with the strained relationships at play between the two women who are there to help treat him at the time he needs it the most. This makes for a quite bland time here waiting around for this one to try offering up the kind of strained and fractured scenes bringing their emotions to the surface, the longer they stay there to perform the ritual, so everything here becomes a struggle to get invested in their emotionally draining quarrels. The other problem here is the bizarre series of general, troublesome motivations for how everything is supposed to go down. The initial setup of the family relationship being strained between the two women is enough to help us overlook how the whole turn to the spiritual goes from no build-up into the supernatural. This drops the mothers' descent into the mystical with rampant usage of occult practices and trinkets almost immediately, which is supposed to represent how little they know about each other, but comes off with little build-up or suspense. That carries on with why they need to carry out the process of bringing him back to life from the dead realm for no point, and that leaves everything with so little information that there are some problematic features with this one.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic violence, Graphic Language, and Brief Nudity.

There is something uncertain and magical in The Surrender as a mother and daughter struggle to manage as they face the dying of their husband and father. The metaphysical supernatural aspects made me ponder the notion of death in light of accepting this inevitability or fighting against letting go. In this aspect, the film is successful; the acting and direction set the scene well to contemplate this and ponder on this release.

The part that drew me away from this contemplation was the general annoyance of the two main characters. The mother and daughter fought, complained, bullied, capitulated, ruminated, and whined about each other for the present and the past. I once called put for the daughter to "Shut up!" even though I was annoyed at the mother for her inability to see past her own needs and desires. (The daughter was suggested to have her own purposes that were selfish as well.)

The family dynamics were a bit too dysfunctional for a clearer focus on grief and recovery. The extreme here lead me to think of a Greek tragedy, but the characters and the plot were too small to match that. Still, I left the film with a sense of having found my own way in grieving and glad I didn't need these extremes to find resolution in my own life.