THE SURRENDER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Surrender, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 22, 2025

There's a level of honesty and complexity to the relationships at the center of The Surrender. After announcing itself as a horror story upfront, writer/director Julia Max's debut feature seems set on defying those expectations during the first act. Once the supernatural gimmickry returns, though, the story mostly puts an end to the character work it established and developed so well.

A brief but unsettling flash-forward of a prologue might hint at horrors to come, in the form of a decayed human-like figure feeding on someone and having hands coming out of an unnatural place, but then, Max immediately grounds the tale in terrible reality. Megan (Colby Minifie) and her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) sit next to a bed, as Robert (Vaughn Armstrong), Megan's father and Barbara's husband of 40-some years, lies dying of cancer.

Any treatment of the disease, we soon learn, has finished, so now, it's simply a matter of reducing the man's pain as much as possible until he dies. That means regular doses of morphine, which Barbara initially attempts to reduce—until a nurse informs the two women that Robert is past the point of the kind of awareness his wife believes is possible. He spends his days and nights asleep, in a haze from the medication, or calling out to Barbara in pain whenever the dosage wears off. Neither of the women believes this is the end for the man each of them loves.

There's a tension between the daughter and mother, because their relationship is the one thing either of them can do anything about at this moment. Megan feels guilty, because she waited to return to her childhood home for this long after her father became ill. She also blames Barbara, though, for keeping so much of Robert's decline a secret from her. In the daughter's mind, her mother tries to control everything, expects too much from others without offering much in return, and is in such denial of her husband's imminent death that it's not helping anyone.

The two argue with the ferocity of pain and the bluntness of two people who know each other far too well, and these scenes are performed by Minifie and Burton with emotional rawness and firm sense of the grief beneath this anger. Through the entire process of Robert dying and the two women failing to cope with it or to find some connection with each other, we might forget that Max has made it plain from the beginning that this story will inevitably become a horror tale. There are momentary reminders, such as a memory of a younger Robert (played by Pete Ploszek) explaining death to a younger Megan (played by Chelsea Alden) that's haunted by his dying older self, but even those scenes are grounded in the harsh reality of what's happening to these characters in the here and now.

Inevitably, death does come. That's when the story turns, as Barbara's denial becomes even stronger and Megan can only go along with it, hearing her father's voice tell her everything she knows about her mother's stubbornness, need to control situations, and suffering. Gradually, the more understandable elements of this story and these characters, such as the mother explaining that some of the daughter's happier memories of and beliefs about her father might not be entirely accurate, fade.

The inexplicable rises. Barbara has a plan. It involves a ritual, to be performed by a mysterious man (played by Neil Sandilands) and that could, despite the almost certain impossibility of the idea, bring Robert back.

As for the rest of the movie, it's a fairly familiar foray into broad eeriness, as the man quietly prepares for this spiritual procedure and Barbara hints at the sacrifices she—as well as Megan, if the daughter does stick around—will have to make for it to succeed, and some genuine shocks, such as when the two women are paralyzed just before the man reveals what the act of the title refers to. The uncertainty of what's going to happen is undeniably creepy, with the house emptied of any worldly possessions or reminders of the living man and the bedroom where he died now filled with totems, occupied by a chalk circle, and lit entirely by more candles than his luggage seems capable of carrying.

As the ritual proceeds, though, it starts to feel more and more like a shallow exercise in atmosphere. We're never fully made aware of the particulars of the procedure, for one thing, so there's no real sense of how or why things go wrong when they actually do. A good amount of the process is spent in a different realm, where the circle is surrounded by shadow and so much happens off-screen that it's even more of a puzzle (It's not helpful that the prologue gives away the most terrifying visual of the extended sequence, either).

The most significant issue with the shift, however, is how The Surrender sacrifices the tenuous and tumultuous mother-daughter bond at the heart of its story in favor of these sights and occasional shocks. Their relationship resolves in an anticlimax, along with the whole tale itself, for that matter. That might be in keeping with the movie's initial notions about death and how it eliminates even the possibility of any such resolution, but if that is the point, it's also lost amidst the horror show.

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