The Surrender

But there's something about Julie Max's first direct debut "The Surrender" that delves deeper into the darker sides of the human psyche, exploring the different impacts of what it's like for two people to experience a void from the same common denominator. In reality, you could look at this film is contained for its benefit. It's confined to a couple of indoor spaces with four characters. At the most annoying fracture is a mother/daughter relationship. How many times did the daughter called her (mom)? The entire film? Is very annoying, get this the ending of the movie will feel like it needs about 10 more minutes of the story and unfortunately 91 minutes without the credits went by fast. So I am rating this a 5.6/10 because the first time director should give massive credit to her work she'd accomplish.

This started off bad and got worse, setting the scene and building characters is important. But this dragged on for 45 minutes or so, then the guy comes who is going to do the magic....

As if by this point I wasn't ready to call it a day and succumb to fact I'd utterly wasted 50 minutes the decision was made.

The acting is weak and it gets weaker, whilst I only made it to minute 50.. I'd urge you to save yourself at least 50 minutes. Plenty of other good horror's/thrillers.

In the first part of the film I watched it simply goes over and over the same content, giving the sick guy his meds. Mummy is not happy with the daughter and over and over it goes, one might even go so far as to say this is meant to build plot. It doesn't, the only thing is builds is boredom and the certainty that you made a big mistake putting this film on!

Finally, something good on Shudder - and it's very good. The Surrender is a visceral slow-burn that you feel more than you see. It's a grief-soaked character study with horror woven in so subtly, it creeps up on you. Colby Minifie is magnetic - raw, restrained, and utterly believable - carrying much of the emotional weight with devastating ease. The supernatural elements take a backseat to something more intimate and human, which makes the unsettling moments land even harder.

What's most impressive is how much this film achieves on a modest budget. Even better, it's directed by Julia Max, bringing a fresh and powerful female perspective to the horror genre. Max leans into shadow, silence, and sound design to create something quietly haunting. It's not flashy, and that's its strength. This is horror that listens instead of screams - a proper gem in Shudder's line-up.

I strongly believe this movie deserves at least 6/10. Reminds me a lot of 'A Dark Song', which I think is also hugely underrated.

Here's why I liked this movie: 1) Perfect cast and acting. I notice these things. This movie is mostly played by just 2 actresses - and they do a brilliant job. That mom character got me angry like 3 seconds into the movie - too realistic!

2) Great canonical setup. The atmoshere, the ritual, the 'other place' - nicely done!

3) No unreasonable dialogue, no dumb actions (unexplained that is), no childish behavior, story is not driven by some unreasonable or unbelievable desires.

4) Its not drawn-out. Pace is good.

5) Execution, operator work, little CGI, costumes, decorations - production quality is high. I say that considering that Shudder usually produces low budget movies, yet this visually looks on par with any other movies out there. Dare I say it, nowadays many even 50million+ movies tend to look awful, unprofessional. This one on the contrary - delivers quality where it matters. Picture is simply pleasant to watch.

6) Drama is real, life-like, a tragedy, definetely comes from someone who experienced it, otherwise I don't know how they got it to be so precise.

Obviously there are also weak parts: 1) Story. The end is too abrupt. While it leaves room for speculation, it lacks build up, it lacks proper culmination, it lacks revelation. All these things could've been there with just a little push.

2) Horror. I get the grief, I get the manifestation, I know, this story is probably less about plain horror and more about one person's tragedy, and the drama surrounding it, but I'm just such a fan of a horror, I really want some detail to that part too, I want the theme to be explored and/or at least some clues to what exactly is happening. Yeah...

Overall, I was REALLY pleasently surprised.

This movie resonated with me.

But then a bit dissappointed too, I guess.

I understand the pain, all the pain in this one - I can understand all of it to it's depth - and its brilliantly portrayed.

But yet you've also made an attempt to involve more than that into this movie - a horror, a devil, an another world - and I was hoping for more of that. And I was also hoping for a resolution that wouldn't be so silent. The clearly was some room for that, why didn't it happen?!

Caring for their sick father, a woman and his wife try to make sure they're giving him the best chance at getting better which soon starts to take a toll on them both when he passes away and they begin a ritual to bring him back, leading them to a supernatural route they can't return from.

This was a troublesome and somewhat difficult genre effort. When this one works is based almost entirely around the final half, where the ritual is performed and the couple heads off into the other realm to continue their quest. The exploits of the specific ritual and how they're to follow the set of instructions as they do makes for a solid starting point already so that when they realize that part of the process is to go to the other side and retrieve the soul of their father to bring back with them provide not only a great series of visually-impressive tactics and rituals, but also getting off enough storyline motivations for the chilling storyline revelations. The scenes in the other realm, especially involving the naked figures shown suffering the deformed influence of the demonic figures controlling the dimension, create a series of encounters and emotional resolutions that make for a fun enough time here as this one goes along. There are some problems with this one keeping it down, though. The main aspect of this one tends to revolve around the continued usage and pronounced exploration of generational trauma and grieving between family members, which is inherently clichéd and just bland to sit through. The idea of going through the process of looking into the family history of their dead patriarch and trying to reconcile who he was and what their relationships with him were like carries on from the very beginning with the strained relationships at play between the two women who are there to help treat him at the time he needs it the most. This makes for a quite bland time here waiting around for this one to try offering up the kind of strained and fractured scenes bringing their emotions to the surface, the longer they stay there to perform the ritual, so everything here becomes a struggle to get invested in their emotionally draining quarrels. The other problem here is the bizarre series of general, troublesome motivations for how everything is supposed to go down. The initial setup of the family relationship being strained between the two women is enough to help us overlook how the whole turn to the spiritual goes from no build-up into the supernatural. This drops the mothers' descent into the mystical with rampant usage of occult practices and trinkets almost immediately, which is supposed to represent how little they know about each other, but comes off with little build-up or suspense. That carries on with why they need to carry out the process of bringing him back to life from the dead realm for no point, and that leaves everything with so little information that there are some problematic features with this one.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic violence, Graphic Language, and Brief Nudity.