Not just another isolated place, but one that distinctly makes the cries of the devil (once he finally makes his presence felt) evocative of the howls of wild animals that might spook you in the middle of the night. The film's setting - the middle of the woods, far away from civilization - is not coincidental. Potrykus' archetypal slacker with the heart of darkness is finally taking some initiative. This time, though, Sean (Ty Hickson) is in pursuit - actively trying to conjure the devil, commune with it, as if trying to confront and wrestle with his own dark half. His latest, The Alchemist Cookbook, is once again almost entirely about a single character - once again a twentysomething male - flirting with the devilish corners of his psyche. He's unafraid to be confrontational about it - he tends to hold his camera on figures and faces for significant unbroken stretches, refusing to look away from what is at times almost unbearably aggressive, humiliating, or malevolent.Īnd lingering always is that primal darkness, which in Potrykus' vocabulary is typically animalistic.

Potrykus relies on everyday light sources - natural sunlight, office fluorescents, nightclub spotlights - that give his images a naturalistic quality, and yet there is a subliminal psychological violence to those images. Movies that more or less take place in the minds of their protagonists are a dime a dozen, but these have a remarkable - and deceptive - psychological acuity. And 2015's great Buzzard turned those ideas into a more daring abstraction, a study of a borderline sociopath whose daily existence is an act of willful retreat - even disappearance - from human civilization.Īs mirrors - or, in light of Buzzard's brilliant closing shot sequence, live broadcasts - into his characters' souls, Potrykus' films are unusually in sync with their subjects. The 2010 short Coyote was an experimental take on familiar notions of metamorphosis - man and beast coexisting within one vessel. In 2012's Ape, the quotidian existence of its low-level comedian protagonist was persistently disarmed by vaguely threatening appearances of someone dressed in a gorilla costume, and then later by a man dressed as the devil. There's a surreal incongruity to it, the way Potrykus' visual straightforwardness is broken by hallucinatory images of bestial menace. His films orient themselves in a strange space between the conscious and subconscious, the psyche perpetually bleeding over into the physical, as if dreamed into material existence. The distinction, in fact, doesn't even matter. It will always be there, hovering, whether in pursuit or in wait, whether an internal demon or an external manifestation. If you are the antihero of a Joel Potrykus movie, at least, its presence is an inevitability, one way or another. On animal instincts, communion with the dark, and the lo-fi artistry of Joel Potrykusĭo we chase the beast or does the beast chase us?

The alchemist cookbook oscilloscope