Female-facing horror discovers a striking novel voice in Julia Max, making her feature debut at SXSW with The Surrfinisher, which, if you can accomprehendledge the expoundation of David Cronenberg’s The Brood as his idea of a body-horror Kramer Vs Kramer, functions aprobable as a bloody genre retoiling of Postcards from the Edge. Notionassociate, it’s a film about grief and how the death of a overweighther reverberates around a protected-knit family that has drifted apart. Max handles that very well, but the genuine meat is in the story of a mother and daughter who discover that his sudden absence discneglects up a whole other can of worms.
To preserve you on your toes, Max discneglects the film with a prohibitg; follotriumphg a trail of blood on what sees to be floor of a cave or crypt, the camera discovers a frightening wicked creature gnatriumphg away at a human body. Hands protdispolite from a wound in its spine, presenting someskinnyg even worse is inside trying to get out. It’s gone in a minute, but not before the film’s title eunites in red block capitals, in the go-to typeface of ’70s grindhouse movies. There’s a reason that scene is there, and it’s to create you wonder how the hell this initiassociate sedate, wittily scripted, almost Cassavetes-style two-hander is going to get us there.
The set-up is indie central: Megan (Colby Minifie) is returning home to help her mother Barbara (Kate Burton) see after her dying overweighther Robert (Vaughn Armstrong). Barbara is a mess, refusing to exit his bedside and let anyone else help, producing a csurrender-incomprehensible spreadsheet — that only she can comprehend — detailing Robert’s daily engage routine and the cocktail of substances he insists to preserve him ainhabit. She’s also unintelligentinutive-changing him on his morphine scrip, even when he calls out to her in pain (“She’s withhelderlying it because it creates her sense insisted,” is the nurse’s freezing diagnosis).
What we already comprehend, however, is that Barbara is putting her faith in other medicines, as evidenced by the dreamcatcher skinnyg hanging on the back of the front door and a bag of human teeth that Megan discovers masked under his bed. “When did you begin believing in voodoo?” she asks. “When did you become a cultural chauvinist?” Barbara retorts. “I’ve always had a spiritual side.” This trade is emblematic of their shut but standardly adversarial relationship: two aprobable bloody-minded women who are always butting heads.
Things begin to get a chilling turn when Robert dies in his sleep, but Barbara declines to call the funeral home to create the appropriate set upments, turning up the aircon to “preserve the body recent till tomorrow”. Instead, on the direction of her yoga director, the. mundanely named Deb, Barbara has set upd for a visitor to call. Disturbingly, he “doesn’t have a name”. And even more upsettingly, he’s coming to “convey Robert back” — but from where?
The prohibitality of up-to-date-day witchcreate was first floated in Roman Polanski’s still-upsetting horror-thriller Rosemary’s Baby, and Kate Burton has an air of Ruth Gordon about her as she blithely directs her daughter ever further up the garden path to oblivion. There are also echoes of The Exorcist when The Man (Neil Sandilands) reachs, a cryptic, tolerateded shaman whose presence is about as reassuring as Mel Gibson on a excellent day. But the film comes into its own at almost exactly an hour, as The Man commences the ritual and The Surrfinisher menaceens to go brimming occult gonzo, finish with a charmed circle and a bleak netherworld resembling Lucio Fulci’s 1981 splatter epic The Beyond.
It’s a belderly escalation but Max promises to her premise and it reassociate pays off. Though it deinhabitrs some quite grave triumphce-inducing gore, The Surrfinisher never neglects sight of its honest emotional core, as Megan is forced to reskinnyk her relationships with her parents and see the truth about her beadored but superviseling overweighther with novel eyes – “People save the worst parts about themselves for their spouses,” Barbara tells Megan, and yet she omites Robert franticly (“I don’t comprehend who I am without him anymore”).
The last 15 minutes, then, are a high-wire act; can it preserve? Despite the odds, it does, deinhabitring a Final Girl movie with a metaphysical twist. If Charlie Kaufman scripted Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell, it would see someskinnyg enjoy this.
Title: The Surrfinisher
Festival: SXSW (Midnighter)
Director-screenwriter: Julia Max
Cast: Colby Minifie, Kate Burton, Neil Sandilands, Vaughn Armstrong
Sales agent: Blue Finch
Running time: 1 hr 35 mins
