Fast zombies x slow people = carnage is the formula for The Elixir (now streaming on Netflix), a new blood ‘n’ guts outing from prolific Indonesian director Kimo Stamboel. And by “slow” I mean “slow of mind,” because it theoretically shouldn’t take Mensa-level intelligence to outwit empty-noggined undead folks, but this movie doesn’t concern itself with that. No, instead of ponying up for Zombie Avoidance 101 seminars for its characters, it blows its budget on latex, gruesome contact lenses, miscellaneous gloop and a bit of CGI to render its zombies as gross as possible – which makes the film yell-at-the-screen frustrating at the same time it’s rather impressive in its presentation of gore and action.
THE ELIXIR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Rural Indonesia. The Wani Waras corp cranks out herbal remedies on its assembly line. Company honchos are ready to release an experimental elixir, but the food and drug oversight cohort has yet to approve it. That doesn’t stop CEO Sadimin (Donny Damara) from slugging down a vial of the slime-colored liquid and looking in the mirror with amazement: Gray hair –gone. Wrinkles – gone. Glasses – don’t need those anymore! Maybe now in this de-aged state he’ll only be about 20 years older than his wife, Karina (Eva Celia). He was considering retiring and selling the company, which would mean a sizable payout for his layabout adult son Bang (Marthino Lio) and daughter Kenes (Mikha Tambayong) and her family, husband Rudi (Dimas Anggara) and their young son Han (Varen Arianada Calief). The dough would enable Kenes to divorce Rudi, and maybe compensate for some of her angst over her father marrying Karina, her former best friend. Oh, the melodrama.
Kenes just isn’t happy about much of anything right now, and it doesn’t get any better, since her father seems inclined to keep Wani Waras and reap the profits of the miracle youth drug. Although that’s quickly moot considering the drug’s annoying TV commercial would include the narrator fast-talking through a zillion side effects, one of which would be “rampant cannibalistic zombieism.” And so Sadimin quickly turns into a yellow-eyed, blood-drooling, biting entity who’s covered with stomach-churning crawling skin rashes and moves around in lurching agony, punctuated by prominent crackity-bones noises (crackity bones crackity bones crackity bones bones BONES!). Perhaps it goes without saying that this development is a major inconvenience for all endeavors, be they business or personal. At this point, our protagonists begin hyperventilating and barely stop until the end of the movie, although it slows down for a second after Bang puts a crossbow bolt through his dad’s skull. Rest in putridity, pops.
It doesn’t end there, of course. Sadimin infects one of his servants, who drives off and zombifies just in time to crash into a circumcision party and pass the virus on to all the guests who thought they were going to witness something even more unsettling than their fellow humans going gross and biting each other’s faces off. Here, we meet Ningsih (Claresta Taufan) and her cop boyfriend Rahman (Ardit Erwandha), who might be getting married if he could stop tripping over his own ineptitude and give her the dang ring. She’s pissed at him but that quickly becomes less of a priority once the not-walking-but-running dead run-not-walk amok. Soon enough, the plot divvies up the survivors: Ningsih, Han, Rudi and Karina hole up in a room, holding doors and windows shut lest they get invaded, while Bang, Kenes and Rahman hole up in the police station, also holding doors and windows shut lest they get invaded. Kenes wants her boy and Han wants his mom and there’s much shrieking about it, so prepare for these people to make massively illogical decisions as they try to reunite without getting their asses chomped.
Photo: Netflix
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: 28 Years Later staved off my zombie ennui for a couple of hours; The Elixir unfortunately did not. It also reminds me of the Simpsons episode with the jokes about the fireworks factory.
Performance Worth Watching: When these characters find a moment to settle down and take a breath – which is rare – Tambayong churns up some earnest motherliness and delivers a few heartfelt emotional lines. And then resumes the shrieking.
Memorable Dialogue: Sadimin holds up the elixir and makes the following ironic declaration: “This is going to change everything – the potion of eternal youth!”
Sex and Skin: None.
Photo: Netflix
Our Take: Any zombie movie worth its salt in 2025 needs some kind of wrinkle in the traditional mythos. Zombies What Run Fast was exhausted a couple decades ago (see: the 2004 Dawn of the Dead), so The Elixir engineers its undead to be temporarily mollified by rainfall. You ever see one of those shark documentaries where the maniac scuba diver hypnotizes a great white by rubbing the erogenous zone on its snout? It’s kinda like that. It makes no sense, and occurs without explanation – which is fine, not everything in every movie needs explaining – but it’s nifty, and works within Stamboel’s elaborately choreographed and dynamically shot action sequences. It’s a visually robust film with strong cinematography and a couple of memorably iconic moments, e.g., when a few of our survivors don police riot gear and find themselves surrounded in a suffocating crush of a zombie scrum. Add in the effectively gut-churning makeup and VFX, and the film has a lot going for it.
But “a lot” doesn’t compensate for the movie’s many aggravating instances in which characters are so paralyzed by fear, they lack the capacity to outwit a mushbrained zombie. There’s a lot of standing around and waiting to get chomped in this movie. I guess this makes it easier for them to get bit/infected in increasingly nasty ways – and increasingly repetitive ways, as the film breathlessly drags itself to the conclusion of its bloated 116-minute run time. The drama might carry more intensity and tension if we ever felt invested in the characters’ survival and/or emotional journeys; I can’t say I ever truly gave a snot about whether little shrieking Han and his shrieking mother ever reunited, and frankly, would have been relieved by their demise, if only for the reprieve from all the shrieking.
Samboel’s only goal here is to leadfoot the accelerator and deliver violent, kinetic thrills. That’s fine, except the final product is like cake that tastes pretty good but is a tad dry and has no frosting, sprinkles or other accoutrements gussying it up. The director sacrifices his characters – their bodies and their intelligence – and indulges far too many contrivances (well-timed rainstorms, convenient placement of things one could impale oneself on, a stash of illegal fireworks at the police station, etc.) for the sake of delivering near-non-stop action and gore. For some, this will be enough.
Our Call: But for the rest of us, it just ain’t. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
