Search Film, Company, People...

THE BARRACUDA ALCHEMIST

By Myles YAKSICH

Drama - Development 2025

When the elite and eccentric take in an artistic stray from the Midwest, he’s seduced by their intoxicating world of privilege, illusion, and vice. But to find the unconditional love he craves, he must control his violent impulses—or risk becoming something much darker.

Festivals
& Awards

ScreenCraft 2024

Semifinalist

- Year of production
- 2025
- Genres
- Drama
- Countries
- USA
- Budget
- 5 - 10 M$
- Director(s)
- Myles YAKSICH
- Writer(s)
- Myles YAKSICH
- Producer(s)
- Jennie LEW TUGEND, Myles YAKSICH
- Synopsis
- The Barracuda Alchemist is a stylized psychological thriller about longing, identity, and the dangerous pursuit of reinvention. Set in modern Los Angeles, the story unfolds in a world shaped by difference—where culture, class, sexuality, and identity collide in a city that sometimes appears to reward glamour and punish authenticity. Through a queer and emotionally charged lens, the film explores the hunger for transformation, the illusion of belonging, and the price of survival in a world that rewards performance over truth.
  
  Cole McKenzie is an 18-year-old painter from rural Idaho—a bruised, brilliant stray with a busted Ford Bronco and a duffel bag full of canvases. After a violent incident at prom forces him to flee home, he arrives in L.A. seeking a new life. He crashes with Rae, his Chinese-American adoptive sister, now a successful event planner, but it’s clear their relationship is strained and unfinished. Cole is impulsive and emotionally raw, driven by a desperate need to be loved and understood. When he takes a catering job to stay afloat, his world cracks open.
  
  Enter Grant—a sharply dressed, silver-tongued cultural gatekeeper with a taste for damaged beauty—and Saffron, a glamorous and grieving Beverly Hills widow with a mansion full of art and secrets. Grant and Saffron take Cole under their wing, offering him access to a world of wealth, aesthetic performance, and curated identity. His work begins to sell. His image is refashioned. His loneliness is masked with champagne and custom tailoring. But beneath the shimmer lies something rotten.
  
  As Cole’s status rises, so does the emotional cost. He’s haunted by the past, drawn back into a toxic relationship with Devin, a dangerous boy from Idaho who won’t let him go. As the boundaries blur between benefactor and predator, family and stranger, muse and con artist, Cole begins to unravel. In an attempt to preserve the life he’s created, he agrees to a risky plan involving a fake diamond necklace, a forgotten safe, and a staged theft—one that will end in blood.
  
  What begins as a dream of belonging devolves into a cautionary tale about performance, power, and identity. As Cole claws toward a version of love he’s never known, he must confront his own capacity for violence and deception—and decide what part of himself he’s willing to sacrifice to stay in the light.
  
  The Barracuda Alchemist is a haunting and stylish character study, rooted in emotional vulnerability and layered with queerness, class tension, and cultural duality. It’s about the masks we wear to survive—and the ones that refuse to come off.

THE BARRACUDA ALCHEMIST

Festivals& Awards

Festivals
& Awards