Cookers
dir. MIntz Opens Fri Jan 31
Clinton Street Theater
Before the opening credits of Cookers finish, you’ll have a sense of whether or not you’ll enjoy it. Unlike many cinematic explorations of drug addiction, Cookers doesn’t follow the usual format, wherein good people are seduced into drug-fueled decay. The principle characters, Hector and Dorena, are pretty far gone from the outset, which has them fleeing to an abandoned house to cook up and ingest a tremendous amount of stolen crystal meth. There’s no initial glamorization of the drug, and they don’t seem to have a motive for consuming it, other than the fact that their lives having always been scummy.
Cookers is shot to produce the sensation of the drug itself and, as the characters disassemble into paranoia and hallucination, the camera is increasingly used as a means of disorientation. The picture skips and twitches, and tracers mar everything in view. It doesn’t help that 95% of it takes place in a filthy, creepy house with all the windows blacked out, so you feel as though you’ve been squinting for the better part of its 109 minutes and need a shower just as badly as the increasingly gooey-looking protagonists.
Cookers can certainly be categorized as “effective,” as in, “capable of producing a sizeable effect.” Yet, whether its forcible empathy qualifies as “a good time” is up to the individual. On the one hand, it’s surprisingly frightening, which automatically weeds out patrons who dislike scary movies. Then it depends on how you feel about meth; specifically, whether you’ve ever done it, and whether you’ve ever enjoyed it. If you can’t even stand the feeling of just having had a few too many cups of coffee, Cookers will probably make you queasy. Even if you do get off on over-stimulation, there are few moments during the course of the movie in which any of the characters seem as though they’re genuinely having a good time. And the prevailing message is certainly a heavy-handed damnation of meth use. If nothing else, it might be put to good use as part of a diversion program.