A humorous, put-upon family member who makes a three-hour car trip every week to bring Sean more Doritos and batteries and some unnamed pills, Cortez is played so well by Amari Cheatom that at first it’s easy to assume this film will shift focus entirely and follow him back to whichever city he came from (probably Grand Rapids). Sean’s isolated himself so completely that the only other person he’s seen in what we can only assume is a tremendous amount of time is his cousin Cortez. A dark hermit, Sean’s contentment and tether to reality is the happiness of his cat Kaspar, credited in the film as being played by Fiji. Hickson employs all sorts of sub-verbal communication to acquaint us with just how far he’s left societal norms behind in search of a way to vastly increase his own experience, power, and affluence. Potrykus follows this up with some hypnotic sequences where Sean cuts open batteries with utility knives and mixes all sorts of ridiculously colored chemical compounds while reading from some beat up copy of a vaguely demonic book. By keeping his camera at a distance and employing sound design to highlight the isolation of the scene, the director essentially tells us everything we need to know about Sean to get us started.Ĭompletely alone in the woods with nothing but some metal and rap cassettes, Gatorade, terrible lunch meat, white bread, Doritos, and his cat to keep him company, we quickly understand that Sean is obsessed with finding a way to make as much money as possible with as little human interaction as possible. We meet Sean (Ty Hickson) outside an old-school camper in the middle of some dense woods, gathering some forest materials and walking with a leg brace. The director doesn’t waste much time in introducing his central character. Potrykus seems to have made the decision to set his film here because of its remoteness and stark beauty (stark at least when all the leaves have fallen). It’s a kind of swampy, kind of hilly place with a lot of weird old Dutch legends and some gorgeous, Pure Michigan™ fall colors. While we don’t know for sure The Alchemist Cookbook’s location, it’s pretty easy to assume (for those who’ve been there) that it all takes place in the northwestern Lower Peninsula of Michigan. And so I’m very happy to report that his latest continues some of the honing of focus we saw with Buzzard, distilling the director’s ability to capture indelible moments to the point where dialogue is more of a harmonic embellishment than an aid to the plot. Regardless of the consistency of his as-of-yet small output, hearing this low-budget filmmaker is releasing something new always perks our ears up. While we were absolutely enthralled by the inventiveness of last year’s Buzzard, we felt that some of his more adventurous attempts in Ape verged on the cloying. Michigan director Joel Potrykus has caused some mixed reactions among the crew here at TMT.
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