The Surrender Review

It’s a real feat to create a movie that gets less interesting once occult stuff starts going down, but Shudder’s newest original movie manages to do just that. The Surrender covers an ambitious amount of ground for a story set in one location, but its compelling, character-driven plot gets so lost in paranormal drivel that it ultimately feels pointless.

The feature debut of writer-director Julia Max is half family drama, half supernatural horror, and that first half is actually quite strong. The Boys star Colby Minifie brings a sort of feral rage to Megan, an only child navigating in-home palliative care for her father, Robert (Vaughn Armstrong), alongside her overbearing mother, Barbara (Kate Burton). You can tell that Max has lived through the slow and painful loss of a parent: The Surrender was inspired by the death of her stepfather, and Robert’s fictional demise is grounded and specific as Megan and Barbara navigate medication schedules and adult diapers. The movie is strongest when it’s focused on the relationships between its characters. There’s an obvious power struggle unfolding between Megan and Barbara, as they bicker about medicine and family money and reignite old grievances. When Robert finally dies, Megan and Barbara are briefly, beautifully united by grief.

And then the supernatural horror kicks in. Turns out Barbara, swayed by her anti-vax yoga teacher, has hired a nameless man to resurrect Robert via occult ritual. (Classic mom stuff!) Megan, who up until now has been compulsively incapable of not arguing with her mother, is weirdly amenable to this plan – or at least amenable enough to keep the plot loping along. As the ritual unfolds and the women’s journey grows more perilous, The Surrender completely loses its footing, yanking Megan out of a reality ruled by the striking mundanity of grief and into a metaphysical realm defined by blood and nonsense.

This type of thing can certainly coexist with a realistic onscreen depiction of loss: Hereditary, The Babadook, The Descent, The Invitation – if you want horror movies that grapple with the existential dread surrounding death, there’s your watch list. But it’s a matter of striking the right balance, and The Surrender is noticeably off-kilter. It speeds through Robert’s death – and all the excellent, nuanced material surrounding it – then becomes slow and stale once Barbara reveals her plan to bring him back. It takes forever for the ceremony to get underway, and once it does, all the wailing and bloodshed that ensues is far less chilling than Robert’s actual death. As The Surrender stutters to a close, the pacing becomes even more erratic. Major events fly by quickly and without fanfare, but get ready to sit through multiple insipid flashbacks to Megan’s childhood.

Max shows promise as a director, even if she mismanages the extra time. She and production designer Tahryn Smith make excellent use of their indie budget by turning Robert and Barbara’s house into the ultimate pressure cooker. A massive library and open-concept kitchen make the couple’s wealth apparent, but they also become the staging grounds for devastating arguments and dark deeds. Some of the scares are well-crafted, too, like one sequence where Megan sees ghostly eyes behind her in a mirror.

Ultimately, though, The Surrender’s fatal error is that it mistakes freakishness for scariness. A successful horror movie about grief doesn’t pile a bunch of horrifying stuff on top of the loss – it amplifies the terrifying feelings that already come with it. While we’re taken slowly and monotonously into a darker, less human world, Megan and Barbara’s grief is sidelined. As a result, this is a horror movie where the horror elements feel redundant. The Surrender pulls off a few fun visual tricks, but it’s moments like Megan and Barbara teaming up to close Robert’s mouth before rigor mortis sets in that really linger.