The Alchemist Cookbook’s trajectory ends up being much stranger and less prosaic than that. Indeed, because of these piecemeal perceptual reference points, it’s even possible for a brief period of time to suspect that he’s just cooking meth like your average crestfallen social exile.

Sean’s arcane undertakings and time-killing dawdles-measuring and mixing household ingredients, wrapping himself in Christmas lights and dancing to hip-hop, shouting at unseen terrors in the distance-are strung together in blunt cuts that obscure the time elapsed from one activity to the next, and from a visual standpoint, these scenes are as single-mindedly absorbed in Sean’s immediate vicinity as he often is. Under Potrykus’s aggressively elliptical editing scheme, the specifics of this grand plan are left purposefully unclear. In actuality, Sean, who’s holed himself up in a backwoods camper with only a feline companion, is dealing with paranoia and delusion-namely the preposterous conjecture, seemingly cobbled together from bits and pieces of the Latin voodoo books scattered around his slipshod workspace, that he’ll be able to spontaneously generate wealth through some perfect storm of crazed overthinking. And while Buzzard clung to cause-and-effect drama, The Alchemist Cookbook veers without a compass into a realm of surreal stream of consciousness.īoth the film’s title and its poster design hearken plainly to William Powell’s The Anarchist Cookbook, and sure enough, Hickson’s Sean spends a healthy chunk of his time brewing up DIY chemical concoctions like some overeager student of that notorious Vietnam-era revolution pamphlet. We’re no longer in a geographically defined Michigan (though the film does continue the director’s streak of shooting in his home state), but rather some liminal landscape between civilization and a lunatic mindscape. Swapping out the droopy features and greasy hair of his regular leading man, Joshua Burge, for the smooth proportions of Ty Hickson, Potrykus has again centered his attention on the economically frustrated, goal-deficient young American male, only here he’s modified the canvas. His new film, the beguiling The Alchemist Cookbook, begins where Buzzard left off, with the numbing social context a thing of the past and the hero, like some metamorphosing movie monster of yesteryear, transforming hastily into something beyond (or sub) human. Joel Potrykus’s last film, Buzzard, placed its loafer protagonist in a crushingly dull middle-American milieu until he went berserk, with the donning of Freddy Krueger fingers and Halloween-store masks crudely symbolizing the rejection of a status-quo existence while also staying well within the bounds of realism.

The alchemist cookbook film