There is cinema about outsiders — empathetic depictions, a la Sean Baker’s Tangerine and The Florida Project, of those on society’s margins — and then there is outsider cinema: movies that are as pugnacious as the understandably ostracized characters they portray. Writer-director-editor Joel Potrykus offers an outsider cinema double feature with 2015’s Buzzard and, now, Vulcanizadora. Buzzard introduced us to Marty Jackitansky (Joshua Burge), a mangy, antisocial outcast subsisting on petty scams. Though framed as an independent narrative that can stand on its own (indeed, I didn’t recognize the connection until after the credits rolled), Vulcanizadora picks up with Marty some 10 years later, on a camping trip with his friend Derek (Potrykus, who showed up briefly as the same character in Buzzard). The two men have made a pact, the details of which are vague, but foreboding. If Vulcanizadora begins as a comedy—Derek is an incompetent, self-deluded motormouth who thinks he can start a campfire with the power of positive thinking—you feel the desperation and doom closing in with each passing scene. Burge and Potrykus are both quite good—the director at one point even delivering a pitiable soliloquy/panic attack—but Vulcanizadora mostly unnerves due to the filmmaking. Blaring death metal dominates the lengthy, opening profile shot of the two men walking beside each other. When they scuffle later in the woods, the image freezes in black and white, then zooms into close-ups of their faces over the inexplicable sound of opera. Then there’s an excruciating, climatic scene I won’t spoil, except to say that Potrykus, as is his wont, refuses to cut away, letting the tormented seconds tick by for us and the characters. That’s fitting. Outsider cinema sits in such places longer than other movies would.
(4/30/2025)
