The best thing about The Elixir is its determination to hold almost nothing back. The new Netflix original zombie film from Indonesian horror mainstay Kimo Stamboel (The Queen of Black Magic) is well aware that it’s playing in a well-trodden subgenre, and to its credit, it never tries to reinvent the wheel of zombie cinema. […]
Abadi Nan Jaya. (L to R) Mikha Tambayong, Donny Damara, Eva Celia in Abadi Nan Jaya. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
Yeah, it’s a Succession-style mess, and things get messier when Pak, in possession of this amazing new elixir that makes him look and feel years younger, decides he might not sell after all. But the family barely has time to worry about that, because they soon learn about the elixir’s side effects. What feels at first like eternal life is soon a one-way ticket to becoming undead, and the family will have to work together if they hope to survive without literally eating each other alive.
This is an opportunity to play out a zombie outbreak from its very roots to its fever pitch climax, as the effects of the elixir trigger an infection that spreads via bite throughout the family’s compound and the neighboring village. As the family spreads out amid the chaos, Stamboel fragments the story into various threads, from zombie sieges to chase scenes to all-out carnage, as clueless bystanders fall into the meat grinder that is an ever-increasing undead horde.
When Stamboel is just doing this, playing out a zombie movie in a visually intriguing rural setting with characters in a constant state of overwhelm, The Elixir works like a charm. The film’s zombies, all jerky limb movements and clicking, snarling mouth sounds, are both scary and remarkably compelling character studies, displaying something more like ecstasy than simple lizard brain appetite. They smile and gasp in delight as they pursue their prey, their bodies seemingly puppeted by an unseen god of mischief, and the more they multiply, the wilder the carnage. From a scene shot from the perspective of a fast-crawling corpse with no legs to a breathtaking attack on a truck packed with passengers, Stamboel’s sequences of carnage prove he’s lost none of his intensity or knack for creative violence.
But even with the raw cinematic power at play here, complete with some great gore effects, The Elixir starts to wear on you fairly quickly when it becomes clear that the meatier concepts teased by the premise really aren’t going anywhere. This is a film that starts with a group of rich people arguing over the family fortune, who are then left to sort out their differences while avoiding being eaten alive, but it takes the most predictable path possible to dealing with this drama, while offering only glancing commentary on the metaphors at work. Even when the family crosses paths with the rural working class people around them, The Elixir isn’t all that interested in examining these dynamics, nor is it especially interested in how all of this fits into a narrative built on a pharmaceutical concoction designed as a commercial product meant to be sold and marketed to the vain and the selfish. These things feel more like window dressing than actual moving parts of the storytelling.
Which would be fine if The Elixir forged ahead with its more visceral tendencies and didn’t look back, but that’s not what happens. This film is nearly two hours long, and significant stretches of it proceed without any carnage at all, as Stamboel lets his characters breathe, make big emotional declarations, and, well, pretty much fill out the most predictable character arcs possible. There’s nothing wrong with the ensemble here, and Celia and Tambayong are particularly good, but the material they’re given often feels thin, rote, and worst of all, a drag on the action. After a few of these emotional breaks for characters to work out their differences, you start to feel the tug of their weight as they drag the rest of the film down. It’s not enough to completely sink the ship, but you do get the sense that The Elixir is taking on some water as it tries to steam ahead to its conclusion.
Between the zombie gore, the setpieces, and the multiple subplots each getting their own emotional payoff, The Elixir becomes one of those horror films that’s just throwing anything and everything at the wall, hoping to hit all the expected zombie cinema targets with at least a glancing blow. The trouble is that, for every high, there seems to be a low waiting right around the corner, and the movie’s efforts to be everything all at once leave it stranded between triumph and disaster.
The Elixir is now streaming exclusively on Netflix.
Abadi Nan Jaya. Donny Damara in Abadi Nan Jaya. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
