Dir - Julia Max
Overall: MEH
A full-length debut from writer/director Julia Max that takes on some heady themes, The Surrender ultimately does as much correctly as it does incorrectly. Perhaps that is an unfair way to surmise a work of art, but there are some questionable choices here that jive clumsily with others that seem well in-tuned to a tale about facing up to the perceptions of our loved ones that fuel everything from guilt to frustration and back again. Various comedic beats are scattered throughout, often times right smack in the middle of harrowing ones, giving it a chaotic tone that forces the viewer to take the material less seriously than it otherwise lets on. Also as a horror film, there are some startling, intense, and creepy moments, but there is also a near-consistent musical score that ruins our ability to vicariously live through the otherworldly suffrage of our characters who are thrust into one of the most hopelessly frightening scenarios that one can conjure. Worse yet are some major logic-challenging nonsense that the story asks us to take at face value, with both Colby Minifie and Kate Burton's protagonists behaving in ways that they only would in order to wrap the movie up in an agreeable time frame. It is a cliche to say that there is a better movie hiding in here somewhere, but maybe repeated viewings will reveal that Max was more in control of her agenda than it appears.
Dir - Daniel DelPurgatorio
Overall: WOOF
Occasionally, filmmakers hinge their bets on a third act rug pull, perhaps in an attempt to blow enough minds that viewers will forget and/or forgive the numerous egregious ingredients that proceeded it. The full-length debut Marshmallow from director Daniel DelPurgatorio, (working with a script from Black Friday screenwriter Andy Greskoviak), certainly has a wallop of a twist, but the road to get there is paved with deplorable characters, implausible situations, insulting summer camp slasher cliches, and a disastrous presentation that seems as if it was edited together by aggressive apes. We meet a shy kid who is bullied, (please stop doing this tripe nonsense in movies, for the love of fuck), other kids who do not talk the way actual kids talk, (again, stop doing this), camp counselors who seem like they were created by an A.I. program that was fed nothing but the The Burning and the Friday the 13th and the Sleepaway Camp franchises, seizure-inducing nightmare sequences cranked to a deafening volume, and then tonal issues for days. When we finally get an explanation, (given to us in a conveniently expository dialog dump), it excuses some of the logical gaps while glossing over others, leaving us on a note that seems like it going for badassery yet is actually just as haphazard as everything else happening here.
Dir - Danny Philippou/Michael Philippou
Overall: MEH
Exasperating the flaws of their debut Talk to Me while sticking with traumatized teenage protagonists, (as well as even more gratuitous gore that is deliberately not for the squeamish), the follow-up from Australian Youtubers-turned-filmmakers Danny and Michael Phillppou is a mess of a movie that collapses under the weight of its heady themes and murky occult-fueled world building. The Phillppou brothers follow the correct procedure in Bring Her Back of dishing out increasingly disturbing and mysterious details that all allude to having an eventual payoff, which they indeed do. The problem is that there are so many of these ideas that at least half of them seem unnecessary and inadvertently under-cooked. This sets up a house of cards to collapse, where the audience will be taken out of the proceedings since the initial ambiguity is fragmented by a sloppy execution that has no hope of tying everything up. The inherent terror of the unknown is a paramount motif that is often necessary in horror, but when such things are balanced with the type of all too real and harrowing events that are suffered by our small crop of characters here, it does not present a fantastical enough universe for inconclusive supernatural laws to be upheld. Things are actually disturbing enough without the uncanny ingredients, since the film deals with how people cope with what cannot be coped with, all too often making a mess of things in the process. If only it just stuck to that, it would be a still uncomfortable yet more unified triumph.
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