A bloody and hallucinogenic portrait of a family falling apart, the desperation of care, and one man’s descent into darkness, Kahuam’s The Remedy is chilling, disturbing, and utterly enthralling.
When a person takes on the responsibility of caring for a terminally ill relative, parent or sibling, their own life often stops. With the right support, this care can be loving, rewarding, and essential in the final act of letting go. But that’s not always the case. Sometimes, the process of care can be lonely, exhausting, traumatic, challenging and distressing as the carer’s world narrows and support is difficult to find.
This is especially true when the person being cared for has stipulated that no medical interventions or hospital support are to be provided, and when you add to this situation a fragmented family, a sibling who also requires support and the pressures of giving up your young life purely to care, each day can become the equivalent of a pressure cooker ready to explode. It’s a world of emotional pressure that Jason (Timothy Granaderos) knows only too well in Alex Kahuam’s The Remedy.
Ever since his mum, Maria, was diagnosed with a life-limiting disease, Jason’s life has centred around the family home, a neoclassical timber-framed house full of herbal remedies, antiques, and dark oak furniture. Jason’s not alone in the house; his younger sister, Rachel (London Thor), is also present, having recently returned from a hospital stay due to her ongoing psychological condition. It’s a condition his mother made him promise to monitor, never allowing Rachel to be taken away again, while also making him promise that, for her, a hospital stay or medical intervention was not part of her care plan. Now his mother lies silent in her bedroom, drifting in and out of consciousness as disease slowly consumes her, her body 100% reliant on Jason’s care as she slowly ebbs away.
Jason once had a career and a loving relationship outside of the home. Still, now he is a prisoner in all but name, a prisoner desperate to save his mother, guilty he can’t do more, and addicted to a range of tablets as he attempts to keep every plate spinning, in a house where sleep evades him, dreams petrify him, and regular blackouts leave him confused. But maybe there is a remedy? a secret potion that could make everything normal again? Hidden in a dusty box, Jason thinks he has found the answer: a recipe, a chant, and a VHS tape that explains everything. But sometimes the cure is worse than the disease.
A bloody and hallucinogenic portrait of a family falling apart, the desperation of care, and one man’s descent into darkness, Kahuam’s The Remedy is chilling, disturbing, and utterly enthralling. From its horrific opening prologue, The Remedy revels in its ambiguity, as what’s real and what’s imagined becomes increasingly difficult to decipher, the horror slowly spreading through each scene like a disease taking control of its host.
Set amongst this ever-growing horror, flashbacks take us back to happier times: Maria reading Jason a bedtime story when he was young, or the whole family gathered for a movie night on the sofa. In Jason’s mind, these times can and will return, and the remedy will make everything better. But in reality, it’s all a lie, a lie born from guilt, trauma and the burden of care. Timothy Granaderos’s central performance captures the psychological turmoil of that lie in exquisite detail, never allowing us to form a full picture of Jason’s rapidly darkening world, one he himself is struggling to understand and navigate.
There are echoes throughout The Remedy of Relic (2020), Pet Sematary (1989) and Oculus (2013), and, like those movies, Alex Kahuam’s film also centres on illness, loss, guilt and unresolved trauma. Yet The Remedy also has a hallucinogenic quality akin to Gaspar Noé’s work. When these themes and style converge, The Remedy becomes an unforgettably chilling psychological and supernatural horror that refuses to let you go when the lights come up in the theatre.
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