This is where he is now, and we’re along for the ride with him as he makes his way down a haunting spiral. Where does he come from? We can make extrapolations, but they aren’t really the point. That one photograph, and how Sean interacts with it, imply infinite possible stories. We can assume the child in the photograph is Sean, we don’t really know. In a powerful image towards the end of the film, he stoically burns a photograph of a black child in the arms of an older relative, but there’s no further context. We don’t really know why Sean is doing what he’s doing. It grounds the film in something that feels real. Their first meeting, where Cortez defiantly chokes down catfood to playfully spite Sean, relieves much of the tension and anxiety that comes when we’re alone with him. Importantly, Cortez is funny, and brings out a humor and tiny, tiny joy in Sean that makes his descent all the more tragic. Sean and Cortez’s exchanges help reset the pace when watching Sean be a weirdo alone in the woods threatens to become a bit too much. He is our link to an outside world we know must exist, a world we understand Sean must have at one point been a part of, and that contextualizes Sean in a fascinating way. Sean interacts with one other human character in The Alchemist Cookbook, a vaguely defined relative named Cortez, played by Amari Cheatom. Late in the film, when his constant feline companion is suddenly missing, it’s as anxious and disorienting as any other moment in the film. One of the strongest and most memorable arcs of the film is his relationship to a possum. Without much in the way of human company, Sean comes alive in small moments shared with non-verbal companions. The film is kept insular by severing most ties to the outside world, holding close to Sean alone in the Michigan woods. Sean struggles, that much is clear, but almost all of the external variables that brought him to the point where we meet him are just barely hinted at.
Such an isolated, weird performance could be hard to connect with, but Hickson and Potrykus make it all feel human. Much of the film is spent watching him in during a mental grapple with himself, scored by classical music, hip hop, and punk rock. Ty Hickson plays Sean, the lead in a role where the vast majority of his screentime is shared with animals or imaginary(?) demons. This is a film with an aura, and for a film that deals so much with the implied, or presences more felt than seen, the balance is an accomplishment for Potrykus. Much of what I like about it lies just beyond the grasp of my ability to verbalize, possibly because what I enjoyed so much in the film doesn’t quite feel concrete, and might more come from the feeling the film captures. Plotwise, that’s about all there is to Joel Potrykus’ The Alchemist Cookbook, a film that I find hard to organize thoughts on. A man lives alone in the woods with his cat, attempting to use alchemy to summon the devil and create riches for himself.