Vulcanizadora is screening as part of the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 18 to August 4.

Joel Potrykus has made a career out of making independent films about ostracized, lonely, deadbeat men in their thirties with no direction and no motivation. His Relaxer, for example, chooses as its focus an unemployed man who allows his brother to torture him with “challenges” which begin with him vomiting a gallon of milk and culminate in him sitting on a couch playing Pac-Man in his own filth for (seemingly) months.

What happens when Potrykus turns his attention on those types of men as they pass into middle age? Vulcanizadora, his latest, sees Potrykus and his frequent collaborator Joshua Burge reprise roles they played in the 2014 film Buzzard. In that film, Burge plays Marty, a low-time scam artist who goes into hiding when his crimes catch up to him. Potrykus’s Derek is the annoying co-worker that gets duped into housing Marty as he tries to lay low and avoid losing his job for stealing checks.

In Vulcanizadora, the two have become friends. Marty is a mopey felon who continues to have little in the way of a future. Derek remains a high energy dimwit, but now he has a young son who he sees less and less of now that he’s divorced.

Marty and Derek wander deep into a Michigan forest intent on dying. The film slowly reveals this premise, but the scent of death is everywhere in their morbid vacation (one early moment sees Derek create a home video that is some strange cross between Jackass and Faces of Death). The pair light off M-80s and drink Jägermeister as they traipse along doing nothing of major interest.

Then, halfway through the film, the two men find themselves on a beach. Derek gleefully swims in the water while Marty sits on the beach solemnly smoking. Later, they gorge on the last of their provisions, which are seemingly entirely made up of junk food and Gatorade. It is here where Derek contends with everything – not just what they have come here to do, but everything. He’s off his meds. He believes everyone has ripped him off. He worries about his son. He recalls a story about how a man experiences Hell, and it isn’t fire and brimstone but a constant state of sadness and nervousness. It’s a heartbreaking sequence that culminates in something gut-wrenching.

The film’s third act is really where the pieces fall into place. What begins as a story of two meandering, lonely people who see nothing in their future becomes a slow meditation on malaise, fear, and guilt. Potrykus taps into something both emotionally potent and morbidly absurd with Vulcanizadora.

After watching some of his other work, Vulcanizadora came into focus in a new way for me. It may not seem possible from the film’s opening section – which is a lot of two guys calling each other “dude” and bickering at each other – but the film is perhaps the filmmaker’s most mature work. This is not to say his former, more juvenile work is bad. In fact, most of it is very good.

There is a sadness that these two men struggle to articulate, but they seem to constantly feel it. If Buzzard is about raging against the bureaucratic systems that keep life difficult and boring, Vulcanizadora is about coming to terms with the harsh reality that that rage will never topple those systems, it will only hurt the one raging. This coming to terms moment is a hopeful kernel inside the rough, bitter shell of the film’s premise.

What makes Potrykus a fascinating filmmaker, in my opinion, is the lack of pretension in the presentation of his characters. They aren’t lovable losers by design. They are genuine losers who, like anyone, may stumble upon likeable moments. Their moments of glory are often decidedly minor or aren’t really glorious moments at all (the great success for Marty at the end of Buzzard is that he evades getting arrested by physically assaulting a man with a makeshift Freddy Krueger glove).

The lack of pretension follows through into Vulcanizadora, the only difference being that there are genuinely profound moments in which the characters must contend with the weight of their mistakes and failures. Marty, the same guy who slashed a guy with a Freddy Krueger glove, sits in Vulcanizadora a much different person. Maybe not a strictly good person (we meet him while he is on trial for committing arson), but a person who has grown. By the end of the film, he has grown again.

There is a rugged authenticity to this no-frills approach to character development. Life is rarely about clear winners and losers, good and bad. Thus, much of life is about living in an uneasy state between winning and losing, between the good and the bad. Vulcanizadora depicts the (mostly) grim and off-color ways in which these characters deal (but mostly fail to deal) with that in-between state. And it’s morbidly fascinating, so long as you can sit through a first act where two guys call each other “dude” and bicker at each other.

Vulcanizadora: B+

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)