Metacritic reviews

It’s difficult to imagine what a script for all of this would even look like. 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.

This unclassifiable miniature involving a man in a trailer in the woods trying to contact the Dark Lord is as funny and distinctive as it is near-plotless.

So compelling is writer-director Joel Potrykus’ unnerving scenario — with its largely ambiguous tone of horror dramatically offset at times by explicit frights — that a viewer isn’t necessarily bothered by a lack of basic story information about who, what, when, where and why.

Its methods may be unconventional, but Joel Potrykus never loses grip of the slippery strangeness.

I bet another viewing would reveal missed details, but the threat of being wrong and finding myself enduring the slow, quiet madness again scares me.