The Surrender
Screaming at the sky between not-so secret cigarettes before composing herself and going back indoors to where her mother Barbara is not-so-secretly going through whole bottles of wine, what stage of grieving is this for Megan, her father Robert lying upstairs, gasping for breath and barely conscious enough to beg for morphine, Barbara rationing it because she would prefer his mind were clear in his last days.
His death inevitable but unwitnessed, Megan moves to acceptance but Barbara has plans to continue bargaining, told by her yoga instructor Deb that there is a man who can bring Robert back to her, preparations carefully made over the last weeks with crystals, feathers, totems and a medicine bag of pulled teeth, now moving forward with curtains drawn, mirrors covered and candles lit as they sit in a circle of ashes.
The debut feature of writer and director Julia Max, The Surrender is what Barbara (Kate Burton) expects of her daughter Megan (Colby Minifie), initially willing to go along with what she believes is a harmless indulgence of her mother’s desperate needs but the rational part of her increasingly resistant as she witnesses a carpet bag of cash being handed over to the mumbling bearded stranger (Neil Sandilands) who knocks on their door.
Barbara’s grief mutating through many unreasonable forms, most strongly expressed is her inflexible need to be in control of everything, micromanaging medication and schedules and quelling any defiance, the only things she cannot control are the spread of her husband’s cancer or the time of his death, the two of them having woken to find Robert (Vaughn Amstrong) already gone, dead eyes staring and jaw frozen open.
Less a dissection of a family in crisis than an obscene post-mortem, the triangle of mother, father and daughter should be the strongest shape but with one side lost it becomes distended, the present a pretence they hold in preference over the memories of the past, where Pete Ploszek’s Robert demanded Chelsea Alden’s Barbara obeyed him while Alaina Pollock’s Megan hovered at the door, pathetic witness to her parents’ endless fighting.
Seeking to snatch a soul from beyond the gates before it becomes hopelessly lost requiring sacrifice and unwavering dedication, The Surrender matches the premise and bleak tone of A Dark Song but takes a very different path once it has stepped into the shadows, the sound of the oversized rats scuttling behind the walls and beneath the polished wooden floors the least horrifying obstacle in the monstrous rituals of negotiating with death.
The Surrender will be available on Shudder from Friday 23rd May
