Reviews
‘The Surrender’ Review – A Visceral, Gnarly Journey Through Grief
Just when a horror trend or theme feels tired and played out, an emerging filmmaker breathes new life into it. That’s the case with The Surrender, the feature debut by writer/director Julia Max. The well trodden exploration of grief in horror gets an exhilarating wakeup call in the form of visceral, violent horror when an already fraught mother-daughter relationship gets tested by loss then the dark occult forces it exposes them to.
Max employs the often mishandled tactic of giving a glimpse of the future before rewinding to the beginning of the story, but it’s forgiven here thanks to the evocative and gnarly yet brief tease of the hellish style of horror ahead. It raises questions without answers before settling in to introduce the perpetually anxious Megan (Colby Minifie) and her frictional relationship with icy mom Barbara (Kate Burton) as they spend nearly every waking moment caring for the family’s dying patriarch. The stresses of caregiving and looming loss compound their somewhat estrangement and highlight their drastically opposite personalities, which comes into clearer focus when Barbara takes drastic measures to bring her husband back from the dead.
Loosely in the vein of A Dark Song, The Surrender refers to its elaborate occult ritual meant to undo death’s handiwork and relieve profound grief. The connections stop there, though, as Max is more interested in exploring the fractured central relationship and how death has a unique way of exposing sides to our loved ones that we never saw before. The intricate and extremely dangerous ritual, led by an intimidating, larger than life character referred to only as The Man (Neil Sandilands), prompts complete compliance that will prove the ultimate test for mom and daughter.
It’s also the ritual itself and where that leads that yields a visceral horror experience. Russell FX brings the bloodletting and violence, and hellish visions from another realm. The Surrender excites on visuals alone, but Max has a knack for scare-crafting as well. While the filmmaker opts for gruesome visuals and an oppressive sense of foreboding, she also injects a rather masterful jump scare so potent and unexpected that it instantly instills excitement for what’s ahead.
The Surrender also smartly never bothers to overexplain its hand. The ritual itself, a patchwork of a variety of cultural influences, is known only to The Man, leaving mom and daughter firmly trapped by his lead. Even the nature of their grief isn’t overly explored; the gamut of emotions and revelations about the family patriarch feels authentic to those who have ever lost a loved one to illness. Death raises so many questions that will never be answered, that can’t be answered, even as those left behind try as they might to make sense of it all. Instead of trying, Max captures the authenticity of coming to terms with the untidy nature of loss and finding the acceptance necessary to move forward. It lends a dual poignancy to the film’s title.
Colby Minifie makes for a formidable lead, capturing the empathetic anxiousness of Megan even as she futilely tries to dissuade her unmovable mother from embarking on a series of life altering, irrevocable decisions. Kate Burton’s steely nerve as Barbara, a devout believer, makes for a perfect counterpart. Their compelling, fraught relationship anchors a wild, breathtaking plunge into the pits of utter darkness, emotionally and physically.
It’s a wholly unique vision of grief, filled with carnage and unspeakable horror that escalates at a steady clip. To see it interpreted in this way, a visceral, thrilling and high-stakes vision without ever dampening the complicated, messy, and unglamorous nature of loss, marks Max as one to watch.
The Surrender made its world premiere at SXSW and is now streaming on Shudder.
Editor’s Note: This SXSW review was originally published on March 10, 2025.
Daniel Kraus is the 2026 recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction thanks to the epic highwire act of his World War I fantasy/horror novel Angel Down. This means that Kraus, an author beloved by genre fans for years, now has more eyes on his work than ever before, particularly from readers who might not typically pick up a novel that veers so heavily into hard genre spaces.
This is why I’m thrilled that, by chance, Kraus’ first post-Pulitzer novel is The Sixth Nik, a spacefaring adventure full of horrifying imagination and brimming over with imagination. Like all of his books, it’s an elegantly written, narratively complex piece full of memorable characters given depth and shade, but as with Angel Down, it’s also an effort by Kraus to stretch his wings, work out some prose muscles that he doesn’t use as much in his straight-ahead horror work. If you’re coming to Kraus for the second time after reading Angel Down, you’re going to get something completely different and yet distinctly Kraus-ian, a space odyssey that’ll make your brain tingle even as your stomach is doing cartwheels.
In the future, when humanity has colonized Mars, Europa, and other nearby habitable worlds to varying degrees, Earth is the site of a secluded sect that has made Greenland their home. This sect is responsible for nurturing the Niffakoq, a kind of messianic child warrior whose legacy is passed down in a way similar to the Dalai Lama. The Niffakoq are trained from birth for their “Chore,” a task they must complete that will radically improve some aspect of life in the cosmos, and given brain implants known as “Niks” to enhance their innate empathic abilities. They also, due to the danger of their chores, rarely live beyond the age of 11.
Nine-year-old Sisilla is the latest of these Niffakoq, and she’s just been given her Chore, involving a faraway colonial outpost on a remote planet that’s rarely in touch with the rest of humanity anymore. To achieve her Chore, Sisilla boards The Sickness, an AI-designed, organic ship that looks like a flying tumor, and meets her crew, including everyone from a bodyguard known only as “Murder 005” to a bodacious engineer who revels in changing her appearance through futuristic procedures to a drug-addicted, reconstructed ship’s medic who offers her a chance to try peyote.
Sisilla is not here to make friends. She’s here to do her Chore, fulfill her purpose in the universe, and pass on to make room for the next Niffakoq. But life on The Sickness determines to surprise her, from an entire room that seems to be made of placenta to a glitching robot that seems to know something of her past. Worst of all, though, it seems that something or someone on board is out to harm the whole crew, and the Chore Sisilla’s spent her whole life preparing for is wrapped around a terrible, paradigm-shifting secret that will make her rethink everything about her life, her purpose, and her place among the stars.
This is a lot of groundwork to lay for one story, in typical epic science fiction fashion, and it’s only scratching the surface of what The Sixth Nik has to offer, from ship’s quarters hidden behind curtains of impossibly long human hair to an encounter with worms that left even my strong stomach churning a bit. To pull off something this grand, this multi-tonal and big, Kraus has to lay everything out elegantly, using Sisilla as the viewpoint character and narrator while keeping her in the dark about each key revelation until exactly the right time. It’s not the kind of book I associate with Kraus and his imagination, but he rises to the challenge with a novel that offers something surprising on each new page, a kind of prose sensory overload that almost tips off into being overstuffed. But not quite.
More than the worldbuilding and vibrant cast of characters, though, what makes The Sixth Nik stand out is Kraus’s layered, often cognitively dissonant view of humanity’s future. Technological advances render some troubles obsolete, only to create entirely new problems. Humans morph and shift themselves in so many ways that they sometimes seem to be walking Ships of Theseus. Building ships from organic matter seems more efficient and elegant, yet it fills each voyage with a parade of grotesqueries.
It is a solar system filled with wonders and horrors in equal measure, and it says something deeply relatable and rewarding about the world we’re in now, this mesh of terrors and triumphs, breakthroughs and brokenness. Kraus managed to capture our own fractured view of the present and catapult it several centuries ahead without losing any of his sci-fi bombast or character-driven sense of wonder. That’s a hard trick to pull off, but it makes The Sixth Nik a hell of a read, and a great new primer for the vast imagination of Daniel Kraus.
The Sixth Nik is available in bookstores now.
You must be logged in to post a comment.