#The alchemist cookbook movie

In actuality, Sean, whoвЂ™s holed himself up in a backwoods camper with only a feline companion, is dealing with paranoia and delusion-namely the preposterous conjecture, seemingly cobbled together from bits and pieces of the Latin voodoo books scattered around his slipshod workspace, that heвЂ™ll be able to spontaneously generate wealth through some perfect storm of crazed overthinking. And while Buzzard clung to cause-and-effect drama, The Alchemist Cookbook veers without a compass into a realm of surreal stream of consciousness.Д«oth the filmвЂ™s title and its poster design hearken plainly to William PowellвЂ™s The Anarchist Cookbook, and sure enough, HicksonвЂ™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.

WeвЂ™re no longer in a geographically defined Michigan (though the film does continue the directorвЂ™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 heвЂ™s modified the canvas.

#The alchemist cookbook movie

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 PotrykusвЂ™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.