The Alchemist Cookbook

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.

A chapter-driven series of sketchy scenes powered by a striking, manic performance by lead actor Ty Hickson.

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.

While "The Alchemist Cookbook" certainly won't be for everyone, it will surely delight and surprise those who can grok its idiosyncratic content.

A different kind of horror film.

Nurturing an unsettling intensity in the film's final moments, Potrykus' work is difficult but invigorating.

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.

Thrillingly unclassifiable.

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.

"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.