Dead Souls

For his directorial swan song, Alex Cox (Repo Man, Straight to Hell) stars in this frontier fable of American greed. Follow mysterious drifter ‘Strindler’ as he scours the West for the names of dead Mexican labourers.

Here at this border town in 1890, Strindler – or is it ‘Swindler’?– raises eyebrows when he offers to pay a pretty penny to add to his list of names. Wandering affably from saloon to ranch, Strindler exercises the old adage that money talks – but sometimes too loudly. Between the town drunk, hot-headed cowherds and local outlaws, Strindler soon finds himself tangled up in his own tall tales.

The Western fits storied filmmaker Cox (Repo Man, IFFR 1985; Sid and Nancy, IFFR 1987) as snugly as the black bowler hat he wears throughout Dead Souls, a loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel of the same name. Pistol duels and crooked officials abound, and spaghetti Western legend Gianni Garko claims a co-writer credit. But Cox’s idiosyncrasy stands out as the film veers tonally through the picaresque, dark satire and genre curveballs you won’t expect.

Despite its cartoonish characters and casual violence, this is a meditative, sincere landscape at the borderlands of the American nightmare: where fortunes rest on a dirty deal, and legacies are built on blood and gold.

– Callum McLean