Alchemist Cookbook, The (2016)
Ari Drew
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Starring Ty Hickson, Amari Cheatom
Directed by Joel Potrykus
SXSW Film Festival goers are no strangers to the offbeat and outright unusual, particularly within the Narrative Features section of the fest, and Joel Potrykus’ follow-up to 2014’s Buzzard is no exception. While still exploring the concepts of anti-establishment views and isolation, his latest entry, The Alchemist Cookbook, takes things in a whole different direction, incorporating magic, demons, and hip-hop.
The Alchemist Cookbook follows hermit Sean (Hickson), a self-taught chemist who spends his days shacked up in an isolated trailer in the middle of some very remote woods. Passing the time chatting to his cat, Kaspar; mixing up chemicals; and filling up on Gatorade and Doritos, Sean’s only real contact with the world is a relative named Cortez (Cheatom), who is growing increasingly fed up with his erratic behavior and anti-social views. It is only with time that we begin to understand Sean’s true goal: He aims to use the ancient tradition of alchemy to gain fortune, even if it costs him his sanity – and potentially his soul.
Even if this sounds like a clear enough view of what The Alchemist Cookbook is all about, I can assure you that you will still be taken aback by what you actually encounter upon sitting for a viewing of Potrykus’ bizarre and often offputting fable. To provide some backstory, the director set out with a very pointed motivation to be both subversive and divisive; he stated that one of his primary goals was frankly to change the traditional “old white man with a beard” image of what an alchemist looks like by instead making him a young, black guy who loves hip-hop. This is all good and well, but more often than not, Potrykus’ end product feels like a rather thin construct built upon lone motivations and sentiments like this that cannot support an entire film.
For the first major chunk of the film, Potrykus hones in on mundane details, with a heavy focus on Sean chewing, gulping, and rustling about in solitude (accompanied by an admittedly grating sound design). Though the technique grows notably irksome after a few minutes, these moments serve to highlight the droning soundtrack of isolation in Sean’s life while also drawing the audience into his perpetually hypnotized headspace. Potrykus’ method comes across as intentional at this point, and one likely still feels reasonably curious about how the director might continue to expand the view of the world through Sean’s detached perspective.
With the introduction of Cortez, however, the film continues to rely on the mundane, but this time via nonsensical conversations that grew quite tiresome very fast — and increasingly annoying. The scenes between Sean and Cortez contain some of the most irritating (and conceivably improvised) dialogue I have seen on film, much of which seems to be played for laughs, but falls shockingly flat. It is through no fault of Cheatom’s or Hickson’s performances that this doesn’t work, as these moments really just feel like scenes from another film. At one point, Cortez states that he must have misplaced Sean’s requested medication, which seems to be the most crucial detail mined from their discussion that actually feels relevant to the story. Ultimately, a scene that could have been wrapped up in a minute or two is unnecessarily extended, which feels suspiciously like Potrykus is attempting to draw the film out through a calculated, but notably unfocused, dependence on minutiae. The attempts at lowbrow humor in these moments also do not particularly cohere with any aspect of the driving plot — the mystical, mental health, isolation — and, again, feel like a way to pad the film.
Luckily, past the midway point The Alchemist Cookbook stops yapping needlessly and starts developing a bit more as a visually and tonally intriguing nightmare, marrying horror and experimental film techniques in a way that is both amusing and chilling. There is a Lars von Trier-esque quality to Protrykus’ take on Sean’s increasing instability, and the outright mystical aspects of the film are handled in very organic ways. It is a delight to watch Hickson disintegrate as Sean succumbs to the power that is overtaking him (to a very intriguingly eclectic soundtrack no less), and even the reappearance of Cortez in a campfire scene is quite frightening and effectively comical in a way that Potrykus must have intended the film to play all along. Additionally, the director gets major points for integrating effective emotional beats into the course of Sean’s mania in surprisingly poignant ways; a monologue delivered by Sean to his cat about what he would do with all of his riches is downright heartbreaking in the midst of the insanity. Creatively, I thoroughly appreciated the film’s novel approach to an otherwise thin storyline, as it is certainly a unique, genre-bending experience when it is firing on all cylinders. If you can find reason within the early lull in The Alchemist Cookbook, odds are that you might really love the whole of it.
Ultimately, though, the more technically and narratively engaging aspects of The Alchemist Cookbook’s second half are not enough to fully recover the film from the sour taste left for me by its early flaws. The film will certainly divide audiences, but likely not in the way that Potrykus intended; the art-house scene may find it too unfocused, while more adventurous horror fans may find the chills too few and far between. I am one who certainly appreciates bold cinematic visions with statements to make — especially when it comes to the topics of societal expectations and the complexities of mental health — but these types of statements work best when film is the vehicle through which they find life and not an arbitrary platform on which they are haphazardly heaped. Potrykus is clearly an impassioned talent with plenty to say; let’s hope that next time he has a better idea of what the delivery of the message looks like first before the camera starts rolling.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
