The Alchemist Cookbook: I’m Going Crazy Out There At The Lake

There’s all kinds of ways to treat dark magic in film - you can go lurid and sensationalistic with it, you can treat it with somber dignity as a path of scholarship, you can reduce it to a few candles and a pentagram, and all of these show up in films I’ve written about. But one thing they all have in common is some kind of religious context, a focus on ritual and communion. Which is fine as far as it goes. Sometimes it works well and conveys grandeur, and sometimes it’s mere cliché.

The Alchemist Cookbook treats it differently, like a ramshackle, homebrew process. It’s less ritual circle and more meth lab, and the results are interesting, framing a story of personal disintegration.

There’s a young man out in a trailer at the edge of a swamp. He’s blasting music really loud and messing with chemical substances of some kind on the oven in the trailer’s kitchen area. It’s littered, cluttered with candles, powders, cans, just a whole mess of things loosely cobbled together and all way too close to open flames. His name is Sean, and though it isn’t immediately clear what he’s up to, in between fitful preparations and decoctions he keeps consulting a book with some kind of mysterious sigil on the front. As it transpires, Sean’s trying to practice alchemy - real lead-into-gold alchemy.

It doesn’t seem like he’s having much success, and Sean, twitchy, manic, (he keeps popping some kind of prescription medication, and it seems to be very important that he keep getting this medication), out in the woods, is becoming increasingly frustrated at his lack of success. And since alchemy is at the intersection of chemistry and magic, what starts off as attempts at homebrew chemistry take a darker turn, and the stovetop experiments turn into rituals out in the woods.

Invocations of old, powerful names.

As loath as I usually am to discuss films in terms of other films, this is an odd one. It’s an indie film shot on a small budget, which helps determine its aesthetic and focus to a certain degree, and it’s about alchemy and dark magic, with a focus on a single person going through a ritual and the ways that starts to change their environment. So, in a lot of ways, this really strikes me as sort of being like A Dark Song by way of Resolution and Jug Face. And again, it’s very much its own thing, and “this meets that” is always going to be simplistic, but these were the touchstones that occurred to me.

Like A Dark Song, it’s about someone using dark magic to single-mindedly pursue an outcome in isolation, and how the results of this work start to change things around the practitioner. Like Resolution and Jug Face, it was shot on a small budget in limited locations, so what we get is less explicitly supernatural than odd and unsettling, by and large, but it definitely sets a tone. Sean’s friend Cortez visits him, brings him food, medication, and supplies for his experiments, and though the film is less focused on their relationship than Resolution is in its protagonists, there are echoes of that same thorny interplay between the one making very bad decisions and the one trying to pull his friend back from the brink. Like Jug Face, it presents a vision of rural life with very little dignity or grandeur - everything is squalid and cheap and shabby, rickety. Everything is falling apart,

Well, everything and everyone. The film is as much about Sean’s steady psychological disintegration as anything else. He’s already in a bad way when we meet him, and the isolation and meddling with powerful forces just speed the process along, so at pretty much no point does his situation feel safe or like he is in control. His recklessness and instability does a lot of the heavy lifting until late in the movie when it becomes very clear there’s something out there, staged as a firelight meeting between Sean and a Cortez who seems…different. The trailer has the ambiance of an illegal still, powerful chemistry being done with store-bought chemicals, flimsy equipment, and the barest minimum of safety precautions. Sean’s mental state and grip on the world are precarious, and he’s invoking demons and making dangerous promises. It could all blow up at any minute.

The film feels both highly claustrophobic, with lots of tight shots and close-ups  in cramped interiors, and at the same time like it’s careening out of control, hurtling toward self-destruction. And this is just the part of it that is about Sean and his own safety. However, it’s just as much about the dark forces with which he’s consorting - he’s out in the middle of nowhere, and all kinds of strange shrieks and howls and bellows come out of the woods at night (and then during the day), suggesting monstrous things just out of sight. And there is Sean, crying out into the dark, taunting those things, daring them to come get him. And they do.

IMDB entry
Available on Amazon