These men ( Buzzard’s Marty and Cookbook’s Sean) filter self-help, successful living mantras through the most bizarre of pragmatics. How can our dreams and goals of the American ideal be realized when our water is poisoned and our infrastructure pulverized? The fears of the 21st century permeate his films, and caught in the middle are these disaffected, arrested-adults. These are sites where life doesn’t relent, where fate crushes people into metaphysical dust. Hailing from Michigan, the center of national tragedies like Detroit and Flint, you’d assume he’s seen some small-town existential grief. Potrykus has a keen eye for the underseen. Low-wage dreams and otherworldly escapes don’t have the power to combat the external juggernaut of capitalism, American society’s ever-turning, stifling wheel in the sky. His golden life haunts him his ambition eats him alive. A half-gilded woods and an unrelenting demon terrorize him instead of manifesting his humble kingdom. All Sean can conjure is a palette of dank browns. He longed for a simple kingdom, something out of the mind of a 12-year-old.Īlchemy is proto-scientific, medieval chemistry that sought to transform matter into gold. He wanted a mansion of gold in the woods, with unlimited Doritos and junk food, soda and sweets for days. Later in the film, as it devolves into a frank portrait of possessed body horror, Sean recounts his once lofty dreams to his cat Kasper. Ambition is the true possession Sean faces. Their fears are of not making it, of being swallowed whole by their desire for some marginal success. These two characters come from very distinct yet similar socioeconomic groups. In Buzzard it was low-wage malaise and a junk food slackerdom that set-off Marty’s break with reality. Potrykus knows the modern world, and creates horror films around it. The horror of the unknown and a lurking evil (which here is very real) soaks the brown-leaved frames with dread. Paranoia is peppered throughout, pressing down upon Sean from every which way. The Alchemist Cookbook captures the fear of a slow mental breakdown in its negative space. A clue to his crazed, off-kilter hermit life is when we see him taking pills, freaking out when Cortez doesn’t bring him a refill. Yet the only threat we ever see lurks in the shadows of the woods, off-screen in noises and low rumbles which constantly startle Sean, and the audience. He’s running from something and he thinks involving the devil will rid him of that threat. And when his relative Cortez shows up with groceries and a bit of needed levity, Sean’s intentions become clearer. It’s soon revealed through a small, tome-like book he constantly refers to that this is some sort of alchemy-witchcraft. As he concocts, we get mixed up with his movements. In those moments, Potrykus and cinematographer Adam Minnick press the camera in over Sean’s shoulder. His boombox blares overhead as he cuts batteries, spins beakers, and creates near mini-environmental disasters. At first glance, Sean is an amateur, pseudo-chemist, mixing God-knows-what in his small shack in the woods. What we are waiting on, we are never really sure. As he attempts to bring order to his world, we just watch, waiting for something to happen. It’s a bit like a human safari by way of tableau vivant. The majority of the film is shot in fixed, flat compositions as Sean moves within each frame. The film adopts an observatory aesthetic early on. When the breakdown comes, it’s from pressures and forces manifested externally. Sean is black, and instead of caw-cawing his way through Detroit’s dank city streets, he is framed and pressed by a remote location, unfamiliar to both us and him. The Alchemist Cookbook is in a way the anti- Buzzard. And so when the paranoia set in, it came from within him. That sort of character work allowed the audience to understand Marty’s worldview externally there was no mistaking his motivations. He wore his eff’-it-all attitude on his sleeve. He went for the conglomerates one frozen pizza coupon scam at a time. Potrykus’ last feature, Buzzard, let the audience in on its protagonist’s ways early on. Yet Sean isn’t interested in a vacation he’s running away – into the arms of the devil. Serenity threads the sky with the branches of the tall trees. There’s freedom in the smells of the freshly fallen leaves.
His newest schizoid of a protagonist is tucked away deep in the Michigan woodlands in what, at the film’s beginning, seems to be an off-the-grid getaway. Or so it seems in Joel Potrykus’ newest paranoia thriller, The Alchemist Cookbook. Sean is trying to build a kingdom on battery chemicals and Dorito dust.
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