If Chantal Ackerman had been a metalhead raised in Michigan on Doritos and Pepsi, she might have made films like those of underground auteur Joel Potrykus: the two share a common taste for observational camera work, prolonged takes, and suspended time. That this current iconoclast can only be compared with a past iconoclast is telling: no one makes movies like Joel Potrykus. While there are shades of many genres in his films - some (e.g. the midnight scare flick, the slacker comedy) quite popular - those frameworks are filtered by a sensibility that gives an exploding head as much emphasis as a burn-out devouring a plate of spaghetti.
At the heart of this dead-beat cinema are core thematic fixations. The Criterion Channel’s Potrykus collection describes his films as “scrappy, darkly comic portraits of losers, slackers, metalheads, and weirdos raging against the system as they struggle to get by on the margins of America’s heartland.” What makes Potrykus’ characters so comical and tragic is their ineffective means of raging against the system - the tools they reach for to appease their dissatisfaction are invariably part of the system: junk food, video games, and popular culture. Potrykus peers in on these self-defeating outcasts from the outside, watching as they bang against the cage of their lives and the director’s unyielding frame.
Potrykus has made all of his films in Michigan, and took steps in his early career to avoid the bureaucratic headaches of a Hollywood film production. His films have since grown in crew and scale, but he remains uncompromising in his depiction of an American void and the extremes its inhabitants will take to escape it.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
5 The Thing From the Factory by the Field (2022)
Oscilloscope
Potrykus’ latest effort, The Thing From the Factory by the Field, follows three teenage metalheads in the 1980s who take their new friend out for a dangerous initiation ritual. Ostensibly, the friend is being initiated into their “band” - but the group doesn’t play instruments, argues over their genre, and can’t agree on a name. Things go awry when they accidentally kill a flying mutant creature from the mysterious nearby factory, which one of the overexcited metalheads proclaims a demon. The four fall into a conversation that covers damnation, the ethics of hunting, religious communion, and metal music. All the while, the specters of the Satanic Panic, suburban morality, and fast-food consumerism hang obliquely over their dilemmas.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
The Thing From the Factory by the Field features many of Potrykus’ core fixations in a concentrated run time. There’s slacker banter galore, an off kilter fusion of dreary realism and EC Comics fantasy, and a fixation on the gross that comments on American consumer culture while delivering low brow humor. Despite the film’s small scale, it is ambitious in that it steps outside Potrykus’ comfort zone: the camera work is subjective and fluid, capturing the romance of teenagers hiking “away” from civilization to perform their minor rebellions in peace. While there is plenty of verbal sparing and phoniness, Potrykus embeds his quartet with an earnestness he has denied his characters in the past. Potrykus always creates sympathy for his main characters’ plights, but it is garnered subtly from the outside. Here, he lets that sincerity drift closer to the surface. Though it is not one of his strongest films, The Thing From the Factory by the Field points to interesting directions the filmmaker’s next phase could take.
RELATED: The 80s’ Satanic Panic: The True Story Behind Stranger Things Season 4’s D&D Plot
4 The Alchemist Cookbook (2016)
After completing his horror tinged unofficial Animal Trilogy, Joel Potrykus made his first outright horror film with The Alchemist Cookbook. This still being a Potrykus joint, the director’s take on the something-scary-in-the-woods movie is a character driven slow burn, told mostly in observational single frames as its paranoid protagonist descends into a world of magic beyond his control. Ty Hickson stars as Sean, a man who has dropped out of civilization to live in the woods with his cat, practicing alchemy. Despite his distaste for society, his sole friend Cortez (Amari Cheatom) brings him consumer supplies to live off of - including pills for an unspecified mental condition. When Sean runs out of pills and shifts his alchemy from an emphasis on science to the supernatural, he unleashes something in the woods.
The Alchemist Cookbook - a title that deliberately mirrors The Anarchist Cookbook to indicate Sean’s rebellious intentions - marks a major shift in Potrykus’ career. It is the first of his films to employ a bona fide film crew and cast professional actors. Hickson’s manic performance carries the film, imbedding it with much history and meaning left unsaid - but Cheatom nearly steals the show, first with impeccable comedic timing and later with a truly unsettling performance. The film also shifts the filmmaker’s focus from urban claustrophobia to the forest as a natural alternative - with its own man-summoned evils. Sean’s downfall is caused by a mindset he attempted to escape. If alchemy begins as a means of touching a natural world civilization had removed him from, it warps into a quest for material gain: Sean summons a demon to grant him wealth and a better life within the civilization he rejected. This demonic pact requires he kills a possum, a brutality that goes against his nature and transgresses against his most meaningful relationship: the bond he shares with his cat, another frail animal.
Like The Thing From the Factory by the Field, this movie is not Potrykus’ most even effort. Its slow burn is very effective, leading to a genuinely freaky second half – but the last quarter of the film loses a little steam. Even so, it mostly works, and represents a major artistic development for the auteur, which he would follow two years later with his best film.
3 Ape (2012)
Factory 25
Seven years before Joker (2019), Potrykus made a Taxi Driver (1976)-adjacent character study about an incompetent comic’s descent into violence. Where the DC film was satisfied to blend elements from Taxi Driver with another Scorsese classic, Potrykus crafted a unique portrait of middle American frustration and rebellion with a rhythm all its own. Starring the Keaton-esque Joshua Burge as Trevor, Ape follows a stand-up comic living in poverty. He has all the rage and vigor to be a great comic – but he gets by on crummy dad jokes. He is reticent to call himself a comedian (really, he just doesn’t want a normal job), and instead funnels his frustrations into his true passion: fire. Throughout the film, the pyromaniac comic tries to write jokes, collect debts, and light fires - all while his world subtly descends into dead-pan absurdity. Throughout the film, Trevor sees a man dressed as an ape, casually out and about as if he were merely another person. The film’s final revelation that the ape is Trevor comes as no surprise, and the character knows it, signified by his smug shrug.
With his assured feature debut, Joel Potrykus established many of his trademarks. The filmmaking is minimalist but formally controlled, capturing Trevor’s world with simple shots that slice into their subject’s psyche. This realism is undercut by a mild surrealism and body horror that only comes to the forefront by the end. The film is the middle entry in Potrykus’ unofficial Animal Trilogy, beginning with the short film Coyote (2010) and ending with Buzzard (2014). Each follows a character that embodies a particular animal (most literally in the lycanthropy-themed short), and is therefore at odds with a society that requires that they act as a human automaton. Trevor’s attraction to stand-up comedy is understandable, but he is held back by the publicity of it: he hides behind polite jokes and a withdrawn manner. It is only when he releases his rage on stage that he achieves any kind of catharsis – but it comes at the cost of a strange bodily transformation. Ape is a rougher rendition of the films that would follow, but it is a fantastic rendition of the anti-social impulses that seek catharsis beneath the weight of an economically depressed life.
2 Buzzard (2014)
Where Ape introduced audiences to Potrykus’ cinematic ambitions, Buzzard arrives as their full realization. The story focuses on Marty, a small-time con artist who works a dead-end temp job at a major bank. When he isn’t skipping work and trying to cheat “your money back” deals for extra cash, Marty is transforming his broken Nintendo glove into a Freddy Krueger-inspired weapon. A misunderstanding of how signing over checks works and a bank assignment to resend missing checks leads Marty to commit an act of fraud that takes him too deep. He goes on the lam with nothing but his stolen checks and modified power glove. Marty’s crimes escalate with his desperation, culminating in his power-gloved assault on a suspicious loan provider - captured by the building’s surveillance cameras. Derek informs Marty by phone that their boss was fired, clearing him of suspicion for his check fraud. Believing he’s in the clear, Marty takes a joyful run down the street - but stops in front of a TV display, where a camera captures him on multiple monitors. In Buzzard’s only major surreal flourish, one of the images of Marty walks away before he does.
Potrykus fully embraces his long take approach here, picking apart the dynamics of his impoverished man-children from an outside view. In his glowing review of the film, Alex Ross Perry wrote that Buzzard differs from other man-children slacker comedies, whose male losers are often economically privileged: by the conclusion they usually get their lives together. Buzzard’s characters are trapped, and their jaded malaise is a coping mechanism as much as a way of life. They vent their frustrations in junk food and video games. The film’s most prominent symbol is the broken gaming glove fashioned into a weapon: at a point Marty’s desperation cannot be overcome with entertainment, and that impulse transforms into violence. The hyper-surveyed corporate world he lives in means that Marty can’t get away with his small (and one big) crimes: this vulture cannot scope out a meal in peace, and must either submit (like his dweeby work friend Derek, played by a magnificently flaccid Joel Potrykus), surrender (as the loan provider urges), or fly away from the omniscient surveilling eyeball that cages the skies, hungry and desperate, for as long as he can.
RELATED: Explained: Here’s Why Video Game Movie Adaptations Often Disappoint Fans
1 Relaxer (2018)
Relaxer begins innocuously enough: Abbie is a jobless loser living with his bully of a brother, who routinely dares him to perform gross and demeaning challenges that he never completes. Despite the useless absurdity of these dares, his brother cites this quitting as proof of the ineptitude that keeps Abbie sleeping on his couch. In a last-ditch effort to prove that he can achieve something, Abbie agrees to a final challenge: he will sit on the couch, alone and mostly naked, while his brother goes on a trip; and he will not get up until he beats level 256 of Pac-Man, before his brother returns. Abbie dedicates himself to the extreme - to say too much more would spoil the mind-melting surprises of this truly strange movie. The only other thing to know going in is that the film takes place toward the end of 1999 with Y2K conspiracy theories running rampant, and level 256 of Pac-Man is literally unbeatable.
Relaxer effortlessly epitomizes and furthers Potrykus’ thematic and aesthetic fixations. The movie follows his objectivist aesthetic (before violently subverting it in key moments) and taste for long takes - but where his previous films embraced a grungy DIY aesthetic, Relaxer is rendered with subtle, fluid cinematography. Potrykus shot the film on a constructed set and indulged in more acrobatic camerawork. All of Potrykus’ films unpack the psychology of semi-abusive friendships and the way bullying passes for intimacy among men - but there is a lightness to the toxicity between Marty and Derek in Buzzard. The relationship between Abbie and his brother is humorous, but ultimately dark and heavy. The slacker surrealism that runs through all of his films shines proudly here, neither understated nor cushioned by genre conventions: if the premise seems like an early Kevin Smith movie, know that the film has much more in common with The Exterminating Angel (1962) than Clerks (1994) - though that burn-out humor is here in droves. Relaxer represents Joel Potrykus at his most ambitious and uncompromising. It is a funny and haunting portrait of millennial hopelessness drenched in spoiled milk and soda, a lens as empathetic as it is critical of a generation that entertains itself to death for the sake of a catharsis that may never come.
