Genre Horror

The Elixir (2025)

Item: The Elixir
Rating: 2.5
Author: Ross McLaren

★★½ — The Elixir (2025)

There's a moment in The Elixir where you can feel exactly what kind of film it wants to be, and another, not long after, where you realise it hasn't quite got there. That gap, small but persistent, is what defines the whole experience.

Netflix's latest Indonesian genre offering slots itself neatly into the Asian zombie wave that's been rolling since Train to Busan rewired everyone's expectations of what a running-dead thriller could do emotionally. The setup here involves a pharmaceutical experiment gone badly wrong, a rage virus let loose across the rural outskirts of Jakarta, and the usual cluster of survivors trying to hold themselves together while the infected tear everything else apart. It's a solid enough premise. Medical ethics, corporate greed, ordinary people caught in extraordinary carnage. There's something genuinely interesting buried in there, and occasionally it surfaces.

When it does, the film delivers. Some of the set pieces in tight farmhouse spaces work well, using confined geography to generate real claustrophobia. The practical effects are decent, the lighting is moody without tipping into murk, and the score does its job keeping your pulse up. The whole thing is put together with obvious care and craft. This is not a lazy production.

But polish only gets you so far. The Elixir's real problem is that it never finds a reason to make you care deeply about the people running for their lives. The characters are drawn in broad strokes, the dialogue leans hard on familiar beats, and the emotional punches the film keeps telegraphing rarely land with any real weight. You feel the shape of where every scene is going before it gets there, and there's no subversion waiting at the destination. It's competent storytelling in service of a story you've already seen.

The social commentary, gesturing at pharmaceutical corruption and the expendability of rural communities, feels like it was meant to give the film some backbone. And it might have, had it been pushed harder. Instead it sits underneath the action like a suggestion rather than a statement. Compare that to something like When Evil Lurks, which uses its genre framework to say something genuinely unsettling about community, guilt and moral rot. The Elixir has neither that ambition nor that nerve.

Indonesian genre cinema is more than capable of extraordinary things. I've raved about The Raid and The Night Comes for Us (2018) at length on this site, films that feel like they're operating at the absolute limit of what their genre can physically do. The Elixir doesn't have that energy. It's careful where those films are reckless, cautious where they're wild. That's not necessarily a fatal flaw, but it does make it feel safe to the point of anonymity.

What you're left with is a perfectly watchable one-sitting zombie film that does nothing wrong enough to walk out on and nothing right enough to stick with you. It fills the runtime, it delivers the expected genre satisfactions in acceptable measure, and then it's gone. By the time the credits roll you've already half-forgotten the character names.

Two and a half stars. If you're deep in the zombie groove and need your next fix, The Elixir will do the job. Just don't expect it to haunt you.

Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2025 | Watched: 2025-11-16

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Netflix Standard with Ads
Physical: Amazon US

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