If a disheveled man with a prodigious beard, dressed all in black — and carrying a mysterious satchel and mumbling incantations — tells you that he can bring your late husband back from the dead, the smart thing to do would be to close the door in his face. But grief warps the mentality of even the most sensible people, so that's not what distraught widow Barbara (Kate Burton) does in The Surrender. She's called this man to her house, and she's willing to do whatever it takes to avoid having to live without her husband of 40 years.
Barbara's daughter Megan (The Boys' Colby Minifie) is less convinced, but she goes along with the ritual that she initially equates to harmless home remedies like incense and crystals. Both of those objects are involved in what the stranger (Neil Sandilands) refers to as the three surrenders, but the process goes far beyond aromatherapy and chakra balancing. By the time Megan realizes what horrors have been unleashed, it's far too late to turn back.
The Surrender opens with a graphic, disturbing flash-forward depicting what appears to be a demon feasting on a dead person's entrails, so it's clear that nasty things are on the way. But for the next 40 minutes or so, it's mostly a two-person domestic drama about the stress and anguish of watching a loved one pass away. Megan has returned home just as her father, Robert (Vaughn Armstrong), is in the final phase of his cancer, confined to his bed and sedated with morphine. She and her mother have a fraught relationship that's been further strained by Robert's illness.
Minifie and Burton dig into the raw emotions that surface in a time of extreme duress, and writer/director Julia Max forces the audience to sit within that discomfort. There's no need for supernatural threats when the pent-up anger from years of resentment comes spilling forth from both mother and daughter. It's devastating enough when Barbara expresses how disappointed she is in her daughter, or when Megan reveals that she stayed away from home because she didn't want to be around her mother.
Then they enter the netherworld.
The Surrender proceeds slowly, and that early gory tease may be nearly forgotten by the time the stranger performs the various rites and sends his clients off into the unknown to retrieve Robert's soul. Still, Max knows how to ratchet up the horror, and the payoff to the tense interpersonal drama is a glimpse into a terrifying, inexplicable world of spirits, where these two women are left to face the consequences of their ill-considered choices.
Even in that netherworld, Max remains focused on the way that Megan processes her generational trauma, especially as her mother forces her to confront some unpleasant truths about her beloved father. "People save the worst parts of themselves for their spouses," Barbara says, and at times it seems baffling that she'd bother with all this effort to bring Robert back at all. Being without him is unfathomable to her, though, and she may pay the ultimate price for that inability to move on.
Max gets a bit lost in the surreal dreamscape of the afterlife, and while she creates some striking visuals of dead-eyed ghouls, the thin narrative thread falls apart as The Surrender heads toward its abrupt conclusion. It's more of a mood piece than a cohesive horror story, and the plot never comes together in a satisfying way. The stranger's elaborate rules and procedures don't amount to much, but the brutal emotional battle between mother and daughter lingers past the film's final perplexing image.
The Surrender
Directed by Julia Max
Starring Colby Minifie, Kate Burton
Streaming on Shudder
