The alchemist cookbook movie#

Sean goes over the grocery list, item by item, anxious and angry, demanding to know where each missing thing is, dismissing the items he does find. Teases him gently, though, and who is there because taking care of your family is what you do. A tense failed ritual is interrupted by a visit from Sean's cousin who regularly brings our main character supplies, who teases him for being quite obviously around the bend. We piece it together.ДЄs the film progresses, the experiments escalate, veering further from science and dangerously close to dark-magic. Nothing is is outright explained, but everything is there to be understood.

The alchemist cookbook movie#

There's something exciting and rare about a movie that trusts its audience, trusts its actors, trusts itself. We hear the threats he hollers at something in the lake, standing in the boat and dropping heavy stones to deliver his words down into the water. We hear the promises he makes his cat about a mansion they'll share, full of doritos. From the film's title we suspect he's trying to make gold out here in a cramped trailer deep in the woods. We see burners, smoke, an old tape-deck, chemical reactions. We watch him saw the copper-top off a battery, dripping its innards into a test tube. So much of this feeling is sustained by the film's complete confidence in Ty Hickson's now-careful and now-unhinged performance as Sean, our back-woods science/dark-magic obsessive. Words aren't missing from the scenes, they were never meant to be there. That feeling of 'when are they gonna talk?' impatience never develops. That wordlessness becomes almost electric, wrapped in the sound of machinery operating, the sawing and clink of science apparatus, and dark, funny music from Detroit's underground music scene. The Alchemist Cookbook (2016) is structured around long, largely wordless sections.