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The film is as much about Sean’s steady psychological disintegration as anything else. Like Jug Face, it presents a vision of rural life with very little dignity or grandeur - everything is squalid and cheap and shabby, rickety. 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 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.Īs loath as I usually am to discuss films in terms of other films, this is an odd one. 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.
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As it transpires, Sean’s trying to practice alchemy - real lead-into-gold alchemy.
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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. 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. He’s blasting music really loud and messing with chemical substances of some kind on the oven in the trailer’s kitchen area. There’s a young man out in a trailer at the edge of a swamp. It’s less ritual circle and more meth lab, and the results are interesting, framing a story of personal disintegration. The Alchemist Cookbook treats it differently, like a ramshackle, homebrew process. Sometimes it works well and conveys grandeur, and sometimes it’s mere cliché. But one thing they all have in common is some kind of religious context, a focus on ritual and communion. 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.