Again, I'm a big fan of any zombie movie — it gives me satisfaction seeing how things play out, whether good or bad. I heard about The Elixir some days ago and how it's making waves, and though it's not from one of the top-rated hoods in the movie industry, I quickly saved it to give it a watch.
The Elixir is an Indonesian 2025 zombie apocalypse movie...
The movie starts with a scene at a party where a car ran through the event, disrupted it, and when they thought the driver was drunk, they checked and saw a zombie who, with no mercy, began to attack everyone. I thought the movie was going to continue like that without a proper intro explaining what caused the infection, but hey, a flash happened and it was a “5 hours earlier” flashback.
An old man, Dimini, owns a popular herbal company named Waris Waras. They had newly developed a special medicine that makes one ageless, and on that day, a sample was brought to him to test — which he did — and his wrinkles disappeared, his grey hair turned dark, and in fact, a once-old man became youthful again. Though his family was happy, the scene looked strange to them. This part introduced the main characters, which are Nes and her husband (Rudi), who are aiming for a divorce because the husband cheated and their marriage has been in a long-term quarrel. They have a son.
Karina, the newly married wife of Dimini, is Nes’s best friend — or rather, was — until she married her father. And here comes Bang, a grown man who still behaves like a baby with his gaming lifestyle.
All of them assembled to talk about selling their herbal company, but when the dad took the newly produced drug and became youthful again, he changed his mind about selling the company, and they began arguing about it.
Suddenly, the dad’s body changed — he vomited blood, died, and woke up as a zombie, beginning to attack everyone. One of the people attacked in the compound took a car to go report to the police station, but while on his way, he turned into a zombie and crashed into the party on the way to the station, causing chaos.
As expected, the whole village was thrown into confusion and violent attacks by the zombies, tearing and eating humans aggressively.
This movie, just like any other survival movie, was filled with emotions, especially during the death scenes of most characters. I wouldn’t want to spoil it by mentioning those who died, but it was a whole lot of emotions watching those scenes of people dying while trying to survive and protect others.
The kind of zombies:
The kind of zombies here are not like the ones in The Walking Dead — these ones are very aggressive, with their bodies cracking in odd ways, and they move at crazy speeds. They also adopted the normal zombie trait of having the head as the only vulnerable spot that can kill them. However, these zombies stand still whenever it rains, and those rainy scenes got me relieved a lot. I applaud the scriptwriter for bringing such an idea — like seriously, if you watch this, you’ll definitely wish for continuous rainfall. Lol.
But then, I feel the movie could have been done as a series, or maybe there’s a sequel or part two coming. At the end of the movie, in the big city where the second sample of the medicine was delivered, an old woman took it and turned young again. I already know what’s coming next, but it ended right there. I really wish part two would be released.
Thanks for reading.
Other photos are screenshots