This concoction won't make you young. It will make you hungry for blood.
The Elixir (orig. Abadi Nan Jaya) (2025)
Now streaming worldwide on Netflix.
A happy and peaceful circumcision ceremony (?!) is thrown into chaos by a wildly careening vehicle that crashes the party in rural Indonesia. The driver emerges and starts munching on the first person he sees.
Roll opening title card.
With The Elixir, now streaming on Netflix and already in the top 5, director Kimo Stamboel, whose work we've loved for many years, says 'hold my beer' to every other horror filmmaker. Dynamic camerawork, furious pacing, and frequent gods-eye view drone shots, looking down on placid fields, lovely little buildings, and humans transformed into killing machines, make The Elixir consistently compelling, even mesmerizing, as its principal cast keeps getting into one situation after another in which no escape seems possible.
After the opening scene, Stamboel rolls back a few hours to introduce the principal players. Recently retired, Dimin (Donny Damara) owns a successful herbal medication company that has developed a new concoction.
While Dimin tries out the first batch -- not yet approved by the local food and safety board -- his children, irresponsible son Bambang (Marthino Lio) and responsible daughter Kenes (Mikha Tambayong), join with Kenes' husband Rudi (Dimas Anggara) in a plan to sell the company. Kenes is planning to divorce Rudi, who recently cheated on her, start her own business, and provide for her young son Raihan (Varen Arianda Calief).
Dimin is a new and younger man as soon as as the medication takes effect, immediately taking his younger wife Karina (Eva Celia) to bed in celebration of his new vigor, then jumping up and informing Kenes, Bambang, and Rudi that he won't be selling the company. This news does not go over well, especially as Karina attempts to mediate and is rebuffed immediately by Kenes, revealing the fractured relationship between the two for reasons that soon become apparent.
Before the family spat can be resolved, it becomes a family splat(terfest), as the marvelous new elixir turns the newly young Dimin into a true family monster, veins popping, skin transforming, growling like a beast in the field, munching on the household staff, and lunging for his own family. As the blood spills and body parts are ripped apart, this becomes a family meeting gone truly wild.
What makes The Elixir work, even beyond the incredible amount of bodies and blood and internal organs and intestines and crunching bones and splattered heads and splattered arms and splattered legs and splattered internal organs, is that it revolves around the family unit. As if one family were not enough, Stamboel and his co-writers, Agasyah Karim and Khalid Kashogi, also introduce (in the opening sequence) a young couple who are contemplating marriage, Rahman (Ardit Erwandha), a police officer, and Ningsih (Claresta Taufan), who figure more prominently in the narrative as it develops.
The film appears to run into multiple dead ends, where the writers seemingly write themselves into brick wall, before they show how they intend to tear down that wall. The bodies who rise up after they have died have two things in common: They run fast. And they're hungry.
Noble sacrifices will be made, melodramatic plot twists will arise, and pulses will be pushed to their limits. In its first scene, The Elixir defines itself as "not for everybody." After that, it's off to the races.
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