The Surrender (2025) 'SXSW' Movie Review: When Grief Becomes A Hound From Hell

What is grief but love persevering? Well, in Julia Max’s visceral, uncompromising world of “The Surrender” (2025), grief also tears you from the inside out. It stalks your waking senses like a ravenous demon and upends your perception of every memory associated with the people you are mourning. Max does not ease us into these discomfiting emotions, as “The Surrender” opens with a revolting image of something feasting on a body, its skin bearing the gnarly evidence of being ripped and possessed. Cut to Megan (Colby Minifie), who has recently arrived at her parents’ place to look after her ailing father, Robert (Vaughn Armstrong). Anxious and suffocated due to her overbearing mother Barbara (Kate Burton), Megan wades through this difficult time in distress, oscillating between emotions that end up forming a noxious cocktail.

Megan and Barbara’s intense, contentious dynamic is the core of “The Surrender,” as this fraught relationship is tested even further once Robert passes away. The horror genre is chock-full of explorations of grief, assessed both on an individual and collective level, where such raw emotions often manifest as vengeful shadows. Max’s treatment of this well-worn theme is nothing short of brilliant and astounding, as the film dwells on the violence inherent in the grieving process.

How cruel is it to watch a parent suffer due to a terminal illness and then process their death for the rest of one’s existence? Every memory they leave behind makes you feel unmoored, and Megan realizes that her perception of her father isn’t as immutable as she thinks. She keeps re-visiting a single memory time and again: the time her father gently spoke to her about the inevitability of death when she was a child, urging her to understand that everyone must learn to let go.

What about her mother, Barbara? While Megan and her mother do not see eye to eye, they do their best to be there for each other during this difficult time. But it’s difficult to be each other’s rock when you’ve been at loggerheads your entire life, and Barbara does not make it easy with her stifling, controlling presence. Although Megan goes along with Barbara’s attempts to cope with Robert’s illness and subsequent death, things take a nasty turn when Barbara declares that she wants to bring him back from the dead. Sprinkles of healing spells and protective satchets were found all over the house before this point (including a trinket made with tufts of Barbara’s hair), so this attempt at necromancy and beyond emerges as an unspeakable culmination of a desperate desire.

The Surrender (2025) — A still from “The Surrender” (2025)

Barbara cannot do this on her own, of course, so a strange, hat-wearing man (Neil Sandilands) appears ominously to get the ritual underway. Every performance in this limited occult setting is electric: Sandilands injects pure terror of the unknown into the premise, while Minifie and Burton remain in sync despite their characters resting on opposing ends of the emotional spectrum. The scares do not feel cheap or unearned, as both mother and daughter are undergoing absolute hell in ways that cannot be articulated. Ritual circles are drawn, personal items are burned, and tears (and blood) are a part of this painful process that might or might not bear fruit. Just as we think the hat-man will safely guide them towards Robert’s soul, the very fabric of reality is shattered and remade.

Max weaves these horrifying developments into a messy, authentic tapestry topped off with grotesque fantastical elements, but none of these extremities ever feel unwelcome. How many horror titles have ventured into the trope of a ritual gone wrong, where its participants are soaked in unimaginable grief? The answer is one too many, but “The Surrender” reinvents the expectations circling such themes and remakes them into something truly terrifying. No easy answers are offered by the end, as life itself does not let us off the hook that easy in the face of great personal calamity. Sometimes, the love that perseveres is the opposite of comforting: it is a shadow that never fades, forever maintaining a hold on our throats as we sleep.