Ryan Marshall

The forest has always been an essential breeding ground for cinematic insanity, and it’s not hard to imagine why; after all, the things closest to us, but which we have really have only begun to understand, are among the most terrifying. Writer/Director Joel Potrykus uses the woodlands to summon a consistent air of dread in his latest genre-defying curio, The Alchemist Cookbook, though it’s hardly the sole location herein whose deep-seeded hallucinatory horrors are so cleverly uprooted throughout the film’s tight, disconcerting narrative. Men and the spaces they occupy alike are deconstructed from the inside out and then put back together again, only to malfunction in spectacularly grotesque fashion after the fact.

Ty Hickson, a relative newcomer with only a few credits to his name, stars as Sean, a mentally unstable young man who has taken to living in a trailer somewhere in the woods, where he can be alone with only himself and his cat Kaspar to practice alchemy as a means of acquiring a fortune. It’s clear that Sean’s pill-popping may be the source of his wild ambition, but at the very least he’s committed, and his friend Cortez (a hilarious Amari Cheatom) visits often to ensure that he’s got plenty of food, tools, and has his prescription refilled to boot.

As good of a friend as Cortez is, he is far from perfect, and one day forgets to bring the meds. Sean, of course, immediately panics, but the initial anxiety is nothing compared to what is to come shortly. As he dabbles with the prospect of black magic, his fragile existence is turned upside down, as supernatural bellows from deep within the woods are revealed to be more than just threatening noises and Sean’s seemingly borderline schizophrenic, one-sided conversations with invisible entities no longer seem so utterly implausible.

The Michigan-based Potrykus prefers to work with restrained budgets, situations and characters, surely providing him with an honest challenge every time he sets out to create – but these limitations seem to have worked in his favor thus far (this is his third feature, after 2012’s Ape and 2014’s Buzzard),  with the film’s concept of terror rivaling even the finest contemporary horror films. One is eventually unable to discern reality from delusion, which brings to mind films such as Let’s Scare Jessica to Death and Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, wherein mental illness and external horrors overlap.

The director concocts an unusual and highly effective cinematic cocktail, combining minimalist introspective character study with Satanic panic, body horror, and occasionally, buddy comedy. Potrykus once described the film as “The Evil Dead as directed by Jim Jarmusch,” which is as apt a description as any; it is simultaneously absurd, disturbing, meditative, and sad. In the end, it is a film about testing our own limitations and exposing the horrifying consequences this might have on the mind and body alike. It’s another thoroughly fascinating work from one of American independent cinema’s most intriguing auteurs.