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 2016