Vulcanizadora (2024)
Directed & Written by Joel Potrykus
Starring Joshua Burge & Joel Potrykus

Drama / Horror

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS!
Turn back or be forever left in the woods.

The inimitable Joel Potrykus returns to your eyeballs with Vulcanizadora, a unique little story about Marty (Joshua Burge) and Derek (Potrykus), two buddies headed into the woods together on what quickly reveals itself to be a disturbing trip. At first it seems like the pair of friends are going camping, or hiking to a far away location. But Marty and Derek have a plan they’re dead set on accomplishing, and they never intend to walk back out of those woods. Underneath the dark comedy of Vulcanizadora is a grim, tragic character study of a deeply depressed person who seems incapable of doing anything other than burning his life, and the lives of others around him, down. We follow Marty on an existential trip through the woods and back home that challenges the nihilism he’s allowed to set his life on fire. Sadly for him, by the time he understands what his nihilistic attitude has done to him—not to mention Derek’s life and the lives of everyone in Derek’s life—the fire has burned his existence beyond recognition and there’s little left to salvage.
Marty leaves a trail of destruction behind him wherever he goes. Early in the film, we hear Derek go on about the “melted tire rubber everywhere” and how the fire Marty evidently started, the one we witness in brief cuts at the start of the film, appeared “like a mushroom cloud,” the ultimate destructive symbol. Marty’s nihilism doesn’t only affect him, it affects anyone who comes into contact with him, it seems. He infects Derek with it throughout their walk into the woods. “Nothing matters anymore,” he says while Derek worries about money and material things on what we slowly understand is actually a death march for the pair. What’s really upsetting is that the relationship between Marty and Derek reveals itself to be far less strong, and not nearly as long, as it feels right at the very beginning. It’s not entirely clear how well Marty and Derek know each other, despite the fact that they, in some ways, act like best friends. This makes it so much sadder that Marty has somehow roped Derek into his nihilism, though as the film progresses it’s obvious Derek isn’t quite as invested in the nihilism. We see Marty having to urge Derek on at various points. At a crucial moment in the film, he insists: “This is what we want.” In one scene, like Marty and Derek are gorging themselves on a last meal, they chow down into a bunch of junk food. We can see how Derek is still enjoying the little things in life, even just a tasty snack, whereas Marty is all but drained of his enjoyment in life. There’s a general childlike innocence to Derek, who’s content eating junk food and digging up old porno magazines buried in the woods like they’re buried treasure. But Marty’s joy in life is gone. Even later, after terrible things have occurred, we see Marty back at home eating chips, shovelling them into his mouth, yet he doesn’t do so with satisfied MMMs as Derek did earlier, he does so like a robot, just doing it out of habit and necessity rather than enjoyment.

The best moment in Vulcanizadora that shows how Marty and Derek are on opposite sides of the spectrum when it comes to nihilism is the moment when Derek asks: “You don‘t think that we can go to Hell for this, right?” Marty talks about being a kid and digging in his backyard when he saw God who told him Hell isn’t real. Derek then describes Hell in a way that sounds a lot like jail (“Can you imagine that, being nervous forever?”), a place that haunts Marty throughout Vulcanizadora. The brief Hell exchange reveals how long Marty has harboured nihilistic feelings, right back to when he was a child. Though even if the story’s something he made up, it still reveals that he feels life has never mattered, not even when he was a little kid.

Through Derek’s death and its aftermath, Marty comes to see that there are things to live for, unfortunately he’s come to that far too late for it to be of any use to him, which is why he walks into the water using the camera tripod, the thing that captured his unintentionally murderous deed, to weigh him down. An aria from the opera Norma—”Casta Diva”—plays while Marty walks into the water, perfectly capturing the whole tragedy that is his life. In the beginning, we hear metal music, starting with Pantera’s “By Demons Be Driven,” and later we get the nu metal “Voodoo” by Gdosmack. This is because, at the start of Vulcanizadora, we’re caught up in Marty’s angry world. Even before the Pantera, there’s an opera piece that opens the film, as we see a raging fire that we later understand Marty started. The operatic music gives way to Pantera right as Marty enters the frame alongside Derek. After horror strikes Marty and Derek, we also hear “Pleurez Mes Yeux” from the opera Le Cid, a French tragicomedy. The music of Potrykus’s film itself tracks Marty’s path wavering between his nihilism and the tragedy it provokes in his life. Vulcanizadora is a slow-burning drama tinged with haunting horror about how lost people draw other lost souls into their midst, though the film doesn’t end without any consequences, as Marty finally understands the dark depths of his destructive trail in life, even if his understanding arrives beyond the point of no return.