.png)
4 hours ago
4 ARTICLE AD
Female-facing horror finds a striking new voice in Julia Max, making her feature debut at SXSW with The Surrender, which, if you can accept the interpretation of David Cronenberg’s The Brood as his idea of a body-horror Kramer Vs Kramer, functions similarly as a bloody genre reworking of Postcards from the Edge. Notionally, it’s a film about grief and how the death of a father reverberates around a tight-knit family that has drifted apart. Max handles that very well, but the real meat is in the story of a mother and daughter who find that his sudden absence opens up a whole other can of worms.
To keep you on your toes, Max opens the film with a bang; following a trail of blood on what looks to be floor of a cave or crypt, the camera finds a frightening demonic creature gnawing away at a human body. Hands protrude from a wound in its spine, suggesting something even worse is inside trying to get out. It’s gone in a minute, but not before the film’s title appears in red block capitals, in the go-to typeface of ’70s grindhouse movies. There’s a reason that scene is there, and it’s to make you wonder how the hell this initially sedate, wittily scripted, almost Cassavetes-style two-hander is going to take us there.
The set-up is indie central: Megan (Colby Minifie) is returning home to help her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) look after her dying father Robert (Vaughn Armstrong). Barbara is a mess, refusing to leave his bedside and let anyone else help, producing a near-incomprehensible spreadsheet — that only she can understand — detailing Robert’s daily care routine and the cocktail of drugs he needs to keep him alive. She’s also short-changing him on his morphine scrip, even when he calls out to her in pain (“She’s withholding it because it makes her feel needed,” is the nurse’s cold diagnosis).
What we already know, however, is that Barbara is putting her faith in other medicines, as evidenced by the dreamcatcher thing hanging on the back of the front door and a bag of human teeth that Megan finds hidden under his bed. “When did you start believing in voodoo?” she asks. “When did you become a cultural chauvinist?” Barbara retorts. “I’ve always had a spiritual side.” This exchange is emblematic of their close but often adversarial relationship: two similarly bloody-minded women who are always butting heads.
Things start to take a chilling turn when Robert dies in his sleep, but Barbara refuses to call the funeral home to make the appropriate arrangements, turning up the aircon to “keep the body fresh till tomorrow”. Instead, on the instruction of her yoga instructor, the. mundanely named Deb, Barbara has arranged for a visitor to call. Disturbingly, he “doesn’t have a name”. And even more disturbingly, he’s coming to “bring Robert back” — but from where?
The banality of modern-day witchcraft was first floated in Roman Polanski’s still-disturbing horror-thriller Rosemary’s Baby, and Kate Burton has an air of Ruth Gordon about her as she blithely leads her daughter ever further up the garden path to oblivion. There are also echoes of The Exorcist when The Man (Neil Sandilands) arrives, a cryptic, bearded shaman whose presence is about as reassuring as Mel Gibson on a good day. But the film comes into its own at almost exactly an hour, as The Man begins the ritual and The Surrender threatens to go full occult gonzo, complete with a charmed circle and a bleak netherworld resembling Lucio Fulci’s 1981 splatter epic The Beyond.
It’s a bold escalation but Max commits to her premise and it really pays off. Though it delivers some quite serious wince-inducing gore, The Surrender never loses sight of its sincere emotional core, as Megan is forced to rethink her relationships with her parents and see the truth about her beloved but controlling father with new eyes – “People save the worst parts about themselves for their spouses,” Barbara tells Megan, and yet she misses Robert desperately (“I don’t know who I am without him anymore”).
The last 15 minutes, then, are a high-wire act; can it sustain? Despite the odds, it does, delivering a Final Girl movie with a metaphysical twist. If Charlie Kaufman scripted Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, it would look something like this.
Title: The Surrender
Festival: SXSW (Midnighter)
Director-screenwriter: Julia Max
Cast: Colby Minifie, Kate Burton, Neil Sandilands, Vaughn Armstrong
Sales agent: Blue Finch
Running time: 1 hr 35 mins
