SXSW 2025 Review: THE SURRENDER, A Mother Attempts to Save Her Husband From Death Through Black Magic
Megan returns home after a long time away to support her mother, Barbara, as her father enters his dying days in writer/director Julia Max’s black magic horror film, The Surrender.
Barbara’s (Kate Burton) husband has been ill for a very long time. When it seems that the end is nigh, Megan (Colby Minifie) returns to the family home to help her mother care for him, even though they have a strained relationship. When the dreaded day comes and dad shuffles loose from this mortal coil, Megan prepares to say goodbye, but Barbara is no quitter, and she calls in a shaman to resurrect her beloved.
The Surrender is one of several films at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival to address the dangers of arrested grief and the inability of loved ones process the finality of death. Much like Ava (Daisy Ridley) in Zak Hilditch’s We Bury the Dead, Burton’s Barbara is desperately clinging to the only partner she’s ever known in a way that suggests that she doesn’t have any idea how to be alone. Her fear of living in a world without her husband drives her to make unfathomable choices to maintain her status quo.
Megan, meanwhile, finds herself confused and shocked by her mother’s decisions. Having been estranged for years, she had no idea of the codependence of her parents’ relationship, but she also doesn’t feel involved enough in their lives to interject. It’s a delicate balance that she is attempting to strike; trying to comfort her mother while also respecting that she’s felt alone and abandoned apart from her spouse for all these years.
Even though Megan finds her mother’s choice to employ a shaman – played with unsettling ease by Neil Sandilands – to attempt a resurrection, she ultimately lands on the rational conclusion that there’s no way it will work, but preventing her mom from trying seems cruel. So, they proceed. And then everything goes wrong.
The Surrender might be the ultimate Call-Your-Mother movie, a warning that staying estranged for years and then trying to reintegrate into a broken family dynamic can be very dangerous. The film explores this attempted reunion through the horror of a nightmarish black magic ritual deeply reminiscent of 2016’s A Dark Song, complete with arcane runes drawn on floors and chaotic, unintended consequences.
Though it rarely treads new ground, The Surrender is nevertheless an effective exploration of grief through the often-ignored lens of mother-daughter relationships. Minifie delivers a strong performance as the befuddled daughter trying to regain her mother’s trust while Burton channels Carrie-era Piper Laurie in a frantic turn as a mother who’ll do anything to hold on to her one true love. The Surrender is a wonderfully complex film that is unafraid to challenge the viewer and delivers bountiful solid scares as it ramps up to its terrifying conclusion.
