The Surrender

dir: Julia Max

2025

I know nothing about this director, but I did hear that this was a keen horror flick about a family losing a beloved father and deciding that denial, delusion and necromancy was the preferred way to go instead of acceptance and healthy grieving, and I was like “sign me the fuck up, Shudder, I’ll watch that for sure!”

And I eventually did. And even though it’s not the best thing I’ve seen in my life, it was a suitably horrifying experience, and not one I can entirely relate to, but there were some resonances.

Colby Minifie stars as Megan, the daughter of a dying patriarch, and she’s finding the situation too much to bear, hence the screaming of obscenities and the surreptitious smoking. She and her mother (Kate Burton) fight constantly about the father’s care, which is understandable at such a time even between a mother and daughter who got along reasonably well, which these two certainly do not.

The father is in a great deal of pain due to… I can’t even remember what he’s dying of, but it’s not like it matters beyond the fact that he is in horrific pain, and prescribed morphine is the only solution. He doesn’t seem like he’s long for this world, as the phrase goes, and he is only semi-mobile, as in able to get up to maybe make it to the bathroom in time, but not often enough. The mother seems determined to do everything in her power to keep her husband around as long as possible, as would anyone in that situation.

The great thing about the story (not the plot), as in, the level of thinking that went into the writing and the performances, is that the conflict between mother and daughter is beyond the fact that they are natural enemies: it’s the keener conflict between the images, the constructs of her parents that Megan carries around in her head with her, versus who they actually are or were. There are regular flashbacks, and their purpose is more to explore whether the way Megan looks at the past has any accuracy, or whether she’s as delusional as her mother eventually is.

Not every set of parental relationships is as simple or simplistic as “Mum was the controlling one, and Dad was the emotionally distant, checked out one”, but there are enough indications that maybe not everything was as straightforward as Megan remembers things. She seems to recall moments and conflicts from the past, but only has the access that she did at the time, as in, the recall of a child without the additional information that would allow her to see a wider picture of how her parents interacted when she was growing up.

Her mother assures Megan that she has a flawed or limited understanding of her dad, since he reserved the worst parts of himself for his spouse, and Megan would know none of that. How chilling. You wonder why she stuck around, like Megan does, and she says he also kept the best parts of himself for her as well, which is like, well okay, what am I supposed to do with that?

The irony is, it’s the diplomatic, go-along-to-get-along, “let her have her way” version of her Dad that allows Megan to go along with something truly bizarre that her mother wants to do once the father dies. Instead of informing the authorities and doing all the stuff that, you know, people have to do when someone dies, the mother has been preparing for weeks seemingly for some kind of ritual to be performed by some wizard or guru or necromancer, with the intention of bringing her husband back.

Back… to what, you might wonder. As in, back from the dead so he can keep screaming out in pain and not making it to the bathroom on time, maybe for the rest of eternity? Or does he come back hearty and hale, running marathons and constantly doing push-ups?

Grief isn’t rational, we know that, and we, on some level, understand what it’s like when someone you love is dying: there are moments where you would try anything to stop it from happening, whether it’s begging them to continue breathing or screaming abuse at the hospital staff, as if that was going to help. There’s lots of unhealthy things people try. Rarely, though, do they think to engage the services of what I’m guessing is a practitioner of the dark arts in order to bring your loved one back from Death itself.

Megan is incredulous, at first, but initially thinks if she goes along with her mum’s insane demands that, at the end of it, at least her mother will be able to accept the dad’s death, and they’ll be able to mourn together. This flick isn’t content to keep this ritualistic stuff symbolic, or allegorical, oh no.

It is, after all, a horror film, and it’s not just a horror film about how terrible (if you actually loved them, and they loved you too), how unfairly wounding it is to lose your beloved parents: it’s that cautionary tale type of horror flick where, damn, there are ways to try and bring people back, but fucking hell, don’t try them, because they make everything so much worse.

We have a long, rich tradition of flicks telling us this isn’t the way to go. Not all of them were written as books by Stephen King and then made into movies or television series, but probably most of them. Pet Sematary springs to mind. Plenty of other people who aren’t Mary Shelley who ghoulishly conceived of Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus also had a similar idea that such actions have dire consequences.

This flick isn’t even saying that bringing him back is a terrible idea. It says, quite explicitly, that if they even try to do these rituals, not only won’t it succeed, but they’ll probably die themselves, and it won’t be a gentle death like the one the dad experiences here.

Oh no, plus they’re going to be missing a lot of fingers for no good reason.

The surrender of the title is not surrendering one’s will in the face of mortality, in the face of a universe that doesn’t care one bit about our feelings, and accepting that no matter how much we love someone and miss them, that we have to let them go. The surrender refers to parts of the ritual they’re meant to conduct in order to get him back. The thing with rituals is, they’re like mathematical equations, at least in terms of how they work here. Unlike equations, which is my simplistic way of rendering “if I do this, with these components, this will be the outcome”, the rituals here work, they actually work, until they don’t.

When the ritual “works”, and mother and daughter, and the (naked) father and the necromancer go to some other place, some place very much other, well, real and inexplicable horror is unleashed, and, congratulations, people involved, you created an image of some unspeakably horrifying creature that will haunt my nightmares indefinitely. I suspect it’s a combination of CGI and practical effects, but good lord, I won’t be sleeping well for while.

I would say it’s arguable as to whether the film loses some of its steam once the supernatural becomes literal, as in, that maybe the flick falls off a bit of a cliff past a certain point. This is low budget horror after all, so much of it is two people arguing mostly in the same room / set. But that arguing, that acting dialogue, the increasing inability to believe or cope with what’s happening on Megan’s behalf is the essence of the flick, and what I “enjoyed” the most, in between surrenders. The ending felt a bit like “we have no idea how best to end this, so here’s whatever”, with an absurd repetition of people cutting their fingers off as if they are the natural currency of the land of the dead, and even that is overused. But I found most of the film pretty strong.

No sequels, as well, I’m pretty sure. This isn’t going to become a franchise, and that’s great. One and done. Let everyone involved go on to something else new, something amazing.
Obviously it’s mostly a two-hander between Colby Minifie and Kate Burton, who do incredibly solid work making something that could have come off as hokey, and we spend 90 per cent of our time with her, but the guy playing the necromancer, Neil Sandilands, damn. He’s kind of terrifying even though his voice never raises above a whisper.

And yet, in the end, even though he must know more about death than our two main characters, he didn’t know enough not to do what they do here, which is clearly an abomination, an offence against the living and the dead, and yet who are we to judge? Wouldn’t many of us sacrifice almost anything to get back the ones we love?

Would we sacrifice other people to get our loved ones back?

In this economy? I think you know the answer.

7 times I have known tremendous grief, and will know it again, but even then I don’t think I’ll resort to necromancy out of 10

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“Have you been smoking?”
- “Have you been drinking?” – touché - The Surrender