DEAD SOULS
(director/writer: Alex Cox; screenwriter: Gianni Garko, poem by Nikolay Gogol; cinematographers: Chance Falkner, Ignacio Aguilar; editor: Merritt Crocker; music: Dan Wool; cast: Alex Cox (Strindler), Zander Schloss (Borracho), Eric Schumacher (Mayor Avery Senator), Brendan Guy Murphy (Sheriff Purdy), Sarah Vista (The Widower), Dick Rude (Dr. Stanton), Ted Falagan (Mr.Oso), Shayn Herndon (The Kid), Amariah Dionne (Rose Chandler); Runtime: 88; MPAA Rating: NR; producers: Merritt Crocker, Guilllermo de Oliveira; Kino Lorber; 2025-USA/Spain-in English & Spanish)
“An entertaining, offbeat, and satirical Western.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
The 71-year-old English indie cult writer/director Alex Cox (“Scene Missing”/”Repo Man”) announced this would be his last film. Dead Souls is an entertaining, offbeat, and satirical Western that’s a parable about greed and narcissism. It skewers contemporary American racism, its duplicitous immigration practices and government corruption. It’s co-written by spaghetti Western actor Gianni Garko.
“Dead Souls” is based on the unfinished 1842 poem by the Russian poet Nikolay Gogol that satirizes corruption in Russia, and transfers the setting and theme to America’s Western frontier in 1890, the year of the U.S. census.
The stranger named Stridler (Alex Cox) is either a businessman, government inspector or an itinerant preacher, who has come to the dusty frontier, border town in Arizona for mysterious reasons. He takes a room in a popular hotel, where he plays cards with the sheriff (Brendan Guy Murphy) and mayor (Eric Schumacher), and offers anyone gold coins if they give him the personal info on dead Mexican workers. He’s taken around town for his business deals by his singing guide Borracho (Zander Schloss) and the mine owner Oso (Ted Falagan). The widower (Sarah Vista, Brit singer/actress) has a good turn as a bar singer doing business with Stridler while in a veil.
Strindler has hatched a sinister plan on America’s devious immigration policies, by collecting the info on the dead Mexican workers still registered as living and then intending to sell the info to the government agencies about their crooked alien policies of having dead souls still receiving benefits as if they were alive. How he carries it out is often very funny but never subtle.
It’s Cox at the top of his game, and despite some forced strains in its political allegory, is thoroughly enjoyable for its comical antics and for its unapologetic indictment of how America so easily trades-in its principles for material gain. Cox hits his target, the corrupt Trump administration, right in its fat head, by linking the 19th century corruption to the modern-day one.
It played at the Rotterdam Film Festival.
REVIEWED ON 7/13/2025 GRADE: B
dennisschwartzreviews.com