Film Review – The Surrender

Death and relationships. They pair together pretty easily for most filmmakers, providing fertile dramatic ground to explore. Writer/director Julia Max makes her feature-length helming debut with “The Surrender,” which takes a surreal look at the pains of personal loss and frayed interactions during a difficult time, also adding a few elements of horror to maintain appeal for genre fans. It’s a tale of communication in many ways, offering a real-world understanding of tensions rising between a mother and daughter who are facing an unbearable situation, and Max hits a few potent notes of confusion along the way. “The Surrender” doesn’t become a riveting chiller or a devastating understanding of grief, but it has some effective sequences when it remains closer to a human experience. Unreality presented here seems better suited for a short film. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com