The Remedy world première at SXSW London, 3 June 2026
It is a common gambit in horror cinema to open in medias res, with a sequence closer to the film’s end than its chronological beginning, and then to rewind events so that we move through them in their proper order while having a foretaste, however decontextualised or even misleading, of where things are headed, which creates a tension in the unfolding narrative. Alex Kahuam’s The Remedy, written by Daniel Kuhlman (who previously appeared in Kahuam’s Failure!, 2023), seems to start like this, as an armed police officer (Jeff Torres) enters a bedroom with Jason Santos (Timothy Granaderos) only to be telekinetically attacked, choked with his own crucifix chain, and then consumed by the barely glimpsed tentacular creature within – only this is not a flashforward, but instead, expressly, a nightmare from which we see Jason waking with a start.
We are in Glendale, California, 1988, confined to a house and its garden that the film never leaves. Jason, recently divorced from Diana (Alexa Ortega), has taken time off from his work as a chemical engineer to return to his childhood home where he is to tend his ailing, bed-bound mother Maria (Jenny O’Hara) for what is evidently the end stage of her life. Looking after Maria entails also looking after his younger sister Rachel (London Thor), whose bipolar disorder and other conditions have meant that the only time she has ever left home was to be in an institution. Mental illness, as Jason tells the neighbour Dave (Kuhlman in cameo), “runs in the family.” Rachel is on meds, and Jason himself is on and off them, even as, in his stress and exhaustion, he experiences blackouts during which he loses track of time, and suffers recurring nightmares about Maria being possessed by something monstrous. Maria, on the other hand, resists all conventional medicine, insisting upon homeopathic remedies and rejecting any kind of hospitalisation. “It’s been kinda nuts around here,” as Jason will tell visiting nurse Katie (Katie Baker).
When they were all younger, Maria used to bring the kids along with her to estate sales, and the house is filled with gothic miscellanea – faded paintings of plague doctors, dead animals in specimen jars, stuffed animals on the walls, mounted insects in frames, kitsch art mixed with devilish iconography. It is as though all the paraphernalia of a haunted castle had been crammed into a much smaller space, and the resulting residence is like a claustrophobic, chaotic cabinet of curiosities. This place has character of an unhinged kind, and is pervaded by a palpable sense of madness. It is also a reflection of its three inhabitants, whose different inner lives congeal in this cluttered space into a toxic brew.
Jason discovers a herbal formula – with associated incantations – that Maria had mail-ordered shortly before her decline, and although he claims not to be a spiritual person, in his desperation to save her and prove his worth, he begins regularly administering the dark-coloured drink to her, closely following the VHS instructions of its giggling creator Leif Johansen (Doug Jones). Meanwhile, Rachel starts performing her own voodoo remedies which come with their own chants, in pseudo Latin to rival Jason’s faux Hebrew. None of this seems salutary – but when Maria shows signs of recovery, both siblings assume it is their own ritualised intervention that has brought about the improvement. Conversely, when things take a turn for the worse, brother and sister spiral with the guilt that that they are singly responsible. Meanwhile Maria develops an unnatural hunger, just like in Jason’s dreams, and transforms into a monster that Jason feels duty-bound to feed, just to keep this dysfunctional family together.
Right from its prologue, The Remedy operates on ambiguity, as the real and the hallucinatory prove hard to disentangle, as cures also cause harm, and as the rituals of family and of alternative medicine cloy into something heady and harrowing. This is a domestic tragedy rewritten in the register of horror, dreaming up possession, murder and cannibalism within the family home.
strap: “It’s been kinda nuts around here”: Alex Kahuam’s nightmarish tragic horror finds some domestic ailments cannot easily be cured
© Anton Bitel
