The appearance of The Alchemist Cookbook on the cinema landscape certainly couldn’t be better timed, especially as a corrective to Jared Hess’s recent heist yarn Masterminds and Jim Hosking’s concurrently released horror comedy The Greasy Strangler.
#THE ALCHEMIST COOKBOOK MOVIE#
This moment is not only one of the most hilarious scenes I’ve seen in a movie in quite a while, but it’s also a pretty good encapsulation of writer/director Joel Potrykus’s methods, with Cortez’s commitment to a blatantly ridiculous dare a miniature version of Potrykus’s own ruthless commitment to chronicling the strangest of human behavior. Cortez takes him up on the challenge, and even though he clearly can’t stand the taste on his first bite, he tries his best to hide this from his friend and takes an even bigger batch for his second helping, only for him to finally give up soon after. Without a real world around Sean his loss of self feels groundless, the chaos of nature bouncing his own madness back and rarely drawing the audience into the shared secret.About a third of the way into The Alchemist Cookbook, Sean (Ty Hickson) dares his friend Cortez (Amari Cheatom) to eat a can of cat food. This results in struggle, with the immediacy and palpable anger of Buzzard dulled under a layer of occult styling. Yet, Sean is someone viewers will want to encompass.
Demons have the power to awe because their evil is unformed and potentially all-consuming. The Alchemist Cookbook is fascinating, but loses specificity by placing itself in the nebulous realm of demons and black magic. The journey isn't for everyone, but The Alchemist Cookbook will find its reverent congregants. The Alchemist Cookbook exists in a no-man's-land between hell and Earth. Meanwhile, Sean’s personal journey becomes increasingly over-the-top, as he transforms his body and demeanor in front of us, then struggles to claw back his humanity from the demon’s grasp. But for the most part the supernatural threat is no more than a scary shape in the woods.
When The Alchemist Cookbook goes genre, it really commits, with one of the best and most chilling possession dramas playing out in front of a forlorn campfire. That The Alchemist Cookbook is both a deeply personal journey and a horror film may leave both arthouse goers and gorehounds feeling shorted. Hickson’s performance as Sean helps out quite a bit here, injecting real pathos into a rock throwing ceremony that may not make any sense to us, but is essential to the narrative he’s experiencing just outside of our grasp (“I’ll give him my fucking teeth, I don’t care!”). With Sean’s mental state degrading over the course of the movie, viewers are often left without much tethering them to the experience. Since The Alchemist Cookbook is taking much of the same youthful anger and societal alienation of Buzzard and piling supernatural horrors on top, it can take some investment and faith. His desperation has smoldered for so long that the devil began to seem like a potential ally. For Sean, poor and black and mentally ill, success in society was so remote that exiling himself to the woods and working on alchemy seemed more viable. Here then is when The Alchemist Cookbook ties itself back to the same desperation that made Buzzard such a lit fuse. I could leave Austin very happy right now (but won't). Joel Potrykus' THE ALCHEMIST'S COOKBOOK is the the type of movie I come to #SXSW for. “I was going to order a truckful of Doritos, eat Doritos sandwiches every day,” Sean says, before outlining his plans for the Little Debbie room. In one of the movie’s most moving scenes, Sean describes his naive fantasies of the rich life. It’s only late in the movie, well after Sean has switched from chemistry to demonology, that his goal’s become clear: he’s searching for wealth independent of society. It all has the comforting regularity of habit, which eventually decays into the compulsiveness of ritual. He spends his days cutting batteries in half, running chemistry experiments and saving the results in his freezer, filtering water and playing with logs. The Alchemist Cookbook is so unmoored that it’s not even clear what Sean is doing out in the forlorn trailer for a significant portion of the movie’s runtime. If anyone at #SXSW has seen Joel Potrykus' THE ALCHEMIST'S COOKBOOK, I'm itching to hear about its "EVIL DEAD by way of Jim Jarmusch" vibes.
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