Funereal Plots
Horror Cinema reviews
Matthew M. Bartlett
The Surrender
Writer/ Director: Julia Max
A man is dying at home with his wife and daughter ministering to his final needs. But first! Here’s a gnarled, knobbed figure neck deep in a dead body! Yes, The Surrender starts boldly with this arresting imagery, then jumps back a little in time to Megan (Colby Minifie) and her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) as they attend to the dying man, emotionally, at times argumentatively, trying to navigate their grief as they try to keep the dying man comfortable.
Megan sees that her mother is utilizing folk remedies (a bag of teeth under the bed) and totems; this, in addition to the flashback, surely portends trouble. And sure enough, when they accidentally give Robert (Vaughn Armstrong) a double dose of morphine, they awaken to find him stiff, gape-mouthed, and cold—quite dead.
Then Barbara leaps into action, insisting that the body be kept cold, and revealing to Megan that a friend has put her in contact with a man who can bring Robert back. They burn his belongings, as apparently prescribed, and gather the ashes. In meaningful, deceptively sunny flashbacks, we see Robert talking frankly about death to his daughter, see the parents arguing over Megan’s interests, observe that the family has its conflicts and its troubles—and sometimes, in the movie’s most effective scenes, monsters from the present crash into the flashbacks in a burst of terrifying aggression and violence.
The man comes to the house. Darkly garbed, heavily bearded, with haunted eyes and a haunting manner, he speaks in gestures only, except when he’s mumbling incantations in a bygone tongue. The trio prepare the room, Robert’s study, with candles, paint occult symbols on the floor, make a circle in which the ritual will be performed.
And everything goes swimmingly, and Robert comes back to life—well, no, we know how these movies work. A seemingly minor act of deception sours the ritual, and mother and daughter are trapped in another dimension with the man—until he’s dragged into darkness—and a glowing-eyed entity that may or may not be Robert.
Trying to bring back the dead—and failing spectacularly—is a longstanding theme in horror, and at this point, it’s been done so many times that a new attempt should show some originality. And there is some here, but not quite enough. Stumbling, creepy naked people have become a cliché at this point—one half expects them to start lurching eerily through romantic comedies and kids’ television shows.
Most importantly, movies like this have to show the consequences of such hubris, even if the ending is ambiguous and open-ended. And that, sadly, is where this movie fails. To my mind, if your audience goes scrambling to Reddit posts Googling “meaning of the ending of The Surrender” – that, to me, signals a stumble. I don’t need everything spelled out for me—I’m a fan of David Lynch and Robert Aickman—but in a movie that makes sense most of the way through, I don’t care how good the performances are (very good) and how effective the scenes of horror (pretty damned effective), I humbly request an actual ending.
