The Surrender

Anyone who has seen the process of dying knows that it's not like someone flicks a switch and they're gone. It’s like a lace curtain blowing in the wind, like the dying person is suddenly on the other side and maybe the wind will blow and they’ll be back. The Surrender, the debut feature from writer/director Julia Max, asks how far their loved ones will go to push that veil back and forth, to go beyond medical heroic measures and transgress into the world of the arcane.

That blurred line between the pain of life and the uncanny nature of what comes after is laid out in the film’s first two images. The first sets the classic supernatural horror tone, a nightmarish vision that draws on the biological impossibilities of Bosch, the epic bleakness of Bruegel the Elder, and the geographies of Goya with their shadowy sparseness. But there is no relief in the world of the living, as mother Barbara (Burton, Scandal, Where'd You Go, Bernadette) and Megan (Minifie, The Boys, Fear the Walking Dead) wait for pater familias Robert (Armstrong, Star Trek: Enterprise) to die in the comfort of his own bed. There’s not much left of him, his best moments a morphine haze, and his eventual passing a mercy.

But as they say, everything after death is for the living, and The Surrender’s real subject is how Barbara and Megan handle the new absence, and how they refuse to let Robert go. For Megan, it’s dreams of her beloved dad, memories of him in her youth, and internal conversations with an older yet more vibrant version of him. Her mother is a little more practical. She has a man and a plan, and that plan is that the man will enact a ritual of conjuring to push that curtain back where it should be, to bring Robert back. However, much as in the exquisite and similarly sorcerous A Dark Song, magic is imprecise. Indeed, it’s not magic, it’s magick, and it’s not a veil, it’s a doorway that should not be opened because of what is on the other side.

Utterly removed from the tepid thrill ride idiocy of The Conjuring movies or the spook show antics of the Paranormal Activity franchise, The Surrender is a slow burn character study drenched in the smoke and candlelight of ancient traditions that predate denominations. As the unnamed magus, Sandiland (News of the World, Coyote Lake) is purposefully anti-charismatic, a hobo as thaumaturge in a cosmos where spells are transactional. Or rather, they are like a lever on a fulcrum, where a small sacrifice – the titular surrender – can have outsize consequences. But the more you want, the more you have to give or give up, and the imprecise measurement of those transactions leads to a final act in which Barbara and Meghan are quite literally thrashing in the darkness.

It’s in this quiet ethical and emotional conundrum that The Surrender finds its purpose and debate, all while conjuring the same hellish yet restrained visions and sensations as A Dark Song. While Liam Gavin’s 2016 mystical drama is a true masterpiece of the genre, The Surrender is still superior to most such tales of the living being unprepared to give up the ghost. Functionally a two-hander between Burton and Minifie, although mostly told from the suffering daughter’s perspective, Max keeps it grounded in their relationship as mother and daughter, each with their own perspective on Robert’s foibles as a husband and father. Underneath the savage occult aspects of the story remains a constant exploration of what it means to see your loved ones as flawed, rounded humans, and ultimately as mortal.