The Elixir

The Elixir (2025) is an Indonesian horror-thriller from director Kimo Stamboel that marries family drama with a full-scale zombie apocalypse. Set in a Javanese village, it centres on a business-owning family whose patriarch, driven by ambition to restore youth via a traditional herbal elixir (jamu), triggers an outbreak of fast-moving, violent zombies.

The family’s various fractures rivalries, secrets, and resentment must suddenly be set aside as they try to survive in a community rapidly overtaken by the undead. With local traditions, cultural context, and rural Indonesian settings, the film gives a distinct local flavour to the zombie genre.

Visually intense and gore-heavy, The Elixir delivers high-impact zombie horror while also showing how human relationships might survive or crumble when society collapses around them. It drops the family into a fight for survival in a collapsing hometown, and forces them to face both external terror and internal conflict.