Young outcast Sean (Ty Hickson) has isolated himself in a trailer in the woods, setting out on alchemic pursuits, with his cat Kaspar as his sole companion. Filled with disdain for authority, he’s fled the daily grind and holed up in the wilderness, escaping a society that has no place for him. But when he turns from chemistry to black magic to crack nature’s secret, things go awry and he awakens something far more sinister and dangerous.
 

Though it is certainly a psychological horror film, Potrykus' Cookbook slyly muddies genre tropes as it effortlessly weaves together seemingly small, and achingly relatable moments, inching towards a haunting climax that'll stick in your craw forever. Placing itself firmly within one of the scariest ideas of all; that it's not the external world that holds the true potential for horror and tragedy, but rather the fiercely internal world of an untethered mind tossed aside by society.

It’s punk in spirit and sometimes grotesque for grotesque’s sake, completely non-mainstream but not inaccessible, in part because Potrykus (himself based in Grand Rapids) never misplaces his affection for bug-eyed, self-mutilating Midwestern losers and because he knows what’s funny. (And, in the case of The Alchemist Cookbook, unexpectedly scary.) But what he gets on a deeper level than anyone else making movies right now are slackerish delusions of grandeur and revenge and the private megalomania of the eternal nobody. He sympathizes with the monsters we like to imagine within ourselves when we feel down, out, angered, and abandoned. - Ignatiy Vishnevetsky