Suffering from delusions of fortune, a young hermit hides out in the forest, only to land in hot water when he summons an ancient demon in the backwoods of Grand Rapids, Mich.
Whatever The Alchemist Cookbook has to express, it expresses through scenes that feel as though someone were dared to do something while a camera rolled, in the near-extinct tradition of the transgressive underground movie.
Potrykus's film beats the recent Blair Witch revamp in making the woods a place where a Terrible Thing could be lurking behind every twig, especially-and most impressively-during the daylight.
"Cabin In The Woods" type horror meets isolation and insanity for what could be one of the year's more interesting genre watches in The Alchemist Cookbook.
Though The Alchemist Cookbook could easily be labeled a work of psychological horror, it transcends the familiar trappings of that genre to evoke something more human and empathetic than simply conveying the terrors of the human mind.
The movie peaks at its midpoint with a chilling nocturnal encounter that blurs the line between hallucination and the genuinely supernatural; the rest of the movie pivots around it, but slowly.