Julia Max’s debut feature approaches grief and tragedy with understated yet deeply effective scares
From A Dark Song to Servant, my favorite horror trope is the paranormal procedural. Rooted in the mysterious, often occult-based actions of characters seeking a resolution to trauma via otherworldly means, it’s a subgenre that directly confronts the random mysteries of life—that in finding some pathway through tragedy, so will we.
What’s refreshing about Julia Max’s The Surrender is that this experience is something shared rather than a solitary one—offering dueling portraits of grief that are equally conflicting, terrifying, and compelling. The film follows Megan (Colby Minifie) and her mother, Barbara (Kate Burton), as they go through the rituals of hospice care for patriarch Robert (Vaughn Armstrong). While Megan prepares herself to let her father go and finally move on, Barbara’s journey isn’t as easy. Seeking to prolong Robert’s life or even cure him, Barbara embraces occult methods—even if they put her at risk, like pulling her own teeth. When Robert finally passes, Megan reluctantly joins her mother in her most intensive occult remedy yet: a multi-day process designed to take them to the afterlife and bring Robert back from the dead.
The clever structure of Max’s debut creates an inseparable fusion between The Surrender’s occult rituals with the deeper “rituals” of grief. From burning photos and belongings of those we hold dear to gruesome bodily mutilation, Max organically dramatizes the myriad ways that grief and death take emotional pieces out of us. Max directly confronts these themes and their natural horrors without coyly dressing them up in a barely-subtextual villain, while also approaching Barbara and Megan’s differing perspectives with a tactful, respectful nuance. Megan, pulling double duty caring for her mother as much as her ailing father, is understandably more than ready to move on with the life she’s put on hold; Barbara, terrified of confronting life without her partner, does all she can to prolong it, whether that involves experimental treatment or something more disturbingly esoteric. In a landscape where Capital-T-Trauma seems to invade every attempt at modern horror, it’s refreshing to see a film that naturally incorporates these themes that risk being overly familiar.
Minifie and Burton are more than up to the task of bringing Max’s complex screenplay to life. Minifie’s wide-eyed fear and indecision fuel much of the film’s terrifying sequences–and as the film gradually isolates her from others, she clears the daunting task of effectively reacting to the more external horror of The Surrender without going to an extreme too far beyond the more grounded anxiety that opens the film. Burton is stellar as Barbara, playing her with the stoic stubbornness of mother figures we’re all familiar with, especially as that headstrong nature begins to undercut the sense of maturity we gave to them as children that we then grow to possess as adults. While it’s easy to trust Barbara at the beginning, Burton chips away at her confident exterior to reveal the complicated, frustrating human underneath–someone wholly selfish and contradictory yet still very human and relatable. The sunk-cost nature of the film’s storytelling lives and dies by Minifie and Burton’s central tension–and is the predominant reason why it’s so easy to surrender to The Surrender’s exploration of grief and horror.
The scrappy nature of the film’s production is quite admirable, with its limited location and resources and emphasis on character work rather than showy visuals bringing to mind Mike Flanagan’s breakout debut Absentia. She still makes room for surprising frights, particularly involving one audience-wide jump at a twist on traditional mirror jump scares. What’s remarkable about Max’s film is her ambitious drive to begin with these sparse resources and limit herself even further. We almost never leave the film’s central house–but when we do, Max somehow manages to make the characters’ new surroundings feel even more limited and claustrophobic, amplifying the unknown terrors facing her characters. It’s here the film makes its biggest swings, experimenting with gory makeup practicals and judicious VFX, recognizing the power of keeping the audience figuratively and literally in the dark as much as possible. One particular shot, bringing light to the darkness, will make your blood run cold long after viewing not just due to the terror of life after death, but the indifference of the dead towards the living.
With its nuanced and deliberate approach to horror, The Surrender is quietly one of the standouts of SXSW 2025’s impressive Midnighter lineup.
The Surrender had its world premiere at SXSW 2025. It’s currently seeking distribution.
