An anxiety ridden man retreats to the woods with his cat in hopes of discovering how to turn any metal into gold. After attempts with elemental science, he quickly turns to alchemaic magic and summons the devil Belial who takes possession of the man.

Dialogue is important to me - especially when scenery is limited. A good dialogue (for example from Toni Morrison to Quentin Tarantino) will capture the audience an hold them for hours without blinking. The dialogue in The Alchemist's Cookbook gave me time to check my Twitter account ... twice.

I assumed this film could be an ad-lib or improvised performance, but I'm certain that isn't true. This is the first work I've watched from Joel Potrykus. He seems to be motivated by the horror genre which I would love to see in most writers. The problem is Potrykus' attempt to connect it with the real world. There are things in reality that one does not need an imagination to view as horrific - But the translation of mythology to realism eludes many people and (award-winner or not) Joel Potrykus is one of them.

The Alchemist Cookbook seeks to rely on the performance of a single actor, that being Ty Hickson. I'm not familiar with Hickson but I want to guess his character is far removed from himself. While the acting isn't anything to scoff over (It's not easy pretending to be alone staring into a mirror while a camera is on you) - I have no idea who Sean is, what he does or did, or even why he's in the situation we find him in. Sean is a void. He's a man in the woods with a cat, so I had to figure him to be the proverbial "crazy cat-lady" that has vacated society because of her crippling obsessions.

That being - There's a desperate need to understand how a crazy cat-lady got to be where she is. Who was Sean before he became a crazy cat-lady? How about something simple like, "What happened to your leg?".

All in all - I didn't enjoy this movie. I wouldn't recommend it for anyone. But I felt I had to leave more than a simple "Don't Bother It's Terrible" review. Some people do that without explanation so I'll watch the film anyway to decide for myself. This movie, specifically, isn't horror - it's not drama - I don't know where to place it besides (maybe) a film school experiment.

You've been warned.

We almost gave up on this movie just a few minutes in, but it paid off. This movie more than reaffirms two rules of life. 1) Don't talk to demons. 2) Don't go off your meds. Give it a chance. I'm glad I did.

Alchemy is, at its essence, the use of natural laws to transmute a thing from a lower state to a higher one. In the popular imagination, this involves transmuting the common base metal lead into the rare metal gold, but the principles of transmutation apply via correspondence on several other levels: the transmutation of mortal flesh to immortal flesh, the transmutation of deindividuated/fractured consciousness into an individuated or whole one, or, most tantalizingly, transmutation of the soul.

One wonders whether in the lore about alchemy whether or not the result you got was based on your intentions. Here, an insane young man in the apparent middle of the Michigan woods in a trailer (there's your Raimi),is seeking what appears to be metallic gold to buy himself a mansion.

The transmutation goes exactly in the wrong direction.

The Jarmusch element is, of course, the fish-out-of-water-and-time aspect of a guy in a Minor Threat tee shirt in the modern age with conceits of being an alchemist, not dissimilar to Ghost Dog who imagines himself a Samurai and is, like Ghost Dog, not completely sane.

Well, that's an understatement.

The film feels like a horror film but is really about madness. Although our lead does not narrate the film, he carries it, and we wind up with a classic unreliable narrator problem: is anything we're seeing real, or are we looking at events through the delusion of a mentally ill man who has stopped taking his pills?

What I suppose is interesting here is the examination of one specific manifestation of insanity - in this case, one that is tied into the occult.

We see things in the woods we aren't sure is really there. Fire flares up and we're not sure if that's really happening. We're not 100% sure what happens to the likable and hilarious Cortez (but we can make an educated guess that it has nothing actually to do with demons.)

The titles and marketing for this film combine two of my interests - alchemy (and fellow students of alchemy, this is not the film you're looking for),with the lettering from the infamous Anarchist Cookbook -- an apt combination of things. As with the Anarchist Cookbook which is full of recipes which are reputed to be unsafe or may blow up in your face, so too alchemy here with its noxious fumes, debts to demons, and so forth.

Part of the problem with marketing this film is there's no way to classify it. The "horror" bucket is what you settle on because it doesn't fit anywhere else, but a serious horror fan is likely to be annoyed by this mostly plotless film. Any verbal description isn't going to match the reality of the film, which is a patient (or slow, depending on how you look at it) study of a man who thinks he's bargaining with demons for gold, but is, in fact, schizophrenic.

All the fixin's are there: paranoia, hallucinations, fear, and self-abuse.

I liked it a lot. I actually thought the two leads did a fantastic job with a script which must have been puzzling when they first encountered it.

But alas, as someone who is waiting for something like a film version of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, it looks like I'm going to be waiting for something about alchemy which isn't so full of darkness.

Still, gutsy, original independent film and one thing it isn't, is derivative.

Just know going in that this is an exploration of broken psychology, and not a horror film in the classic sense of that term.