THE SURRENDER
Starring: Colby Minifie, Kate Burton, Vaughn Armstrong, Riley Rose Critchlow, Mia Ellis, Chelsea Alden, Pete Ploszek, Alaina Pollack, and Neil Sandilands
Director: Julia Max
KATIE
Julia Max’s debut feature is a terrifying and heartbreaking story about the inevitability of confronting grief. Max employs deeply unsettling visuals, gory practical effects, and simple yet effective scares to explore the horrors of losing those closest to you, driven by Colby Minifie and Kate Burton’s incredible performances. They manage to portray the complexities and frustrations that are unique to mother-daughter relationships, and their authentic performances make the morbid banalities of providing care and grieving relatable and moving. Max refuses to assign blame or explain the ambiguous final act, but this speaks to the film’s nuanced exploration of its themes.
ROBERT
The best movies are those that can shrink down universal themes to relate to anyone on a meaningful, microscopic level, and The Surrender manages that beautifully. Caring for a sick family member can be as daunting and harrowing as anything, but to string that out beyond death to discuss family dynamics and strained relationships in the context of a genre film is impressive. You find yourself questioning if your perceptions of your parents or kids are real or carefully curated, that situations derived from memory might play out strongly in your mind but might’ve looked completely different from another perspective. The Surrender is thought-provoking, gut-wrenching, and terrifying.
