Dead Souls

The first feature in almost a decade from maverick British writer-director Alex Cox, Dead Souls is a loose adaptation of the classic absurdist novel of the same name by Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol, relocating the story’s 19th century Russian hinterland to the lawless desert vistas of the Wild West. Originally published in unfinished form in 1842, Gogol’s bitingly dark comic fable has since inspired multiple stage, screen, opera and radio versions. Cox retains the story’s macabre humour and surreal undertow, but his satirical six-shooters are mostly aimed at the ingrained racism that underpins American society, both past and present, an evergreen theme which feels particularly timely in the current political climate. Making its Dutch festival debut in Rotterdam, this is an uneven but enjoyably quirky labour of love from an admirably uncompromising indie auteur.

Though best known for the pulpy sci-fi cult classic Repo Man (1984) and the junkie-punk biopic Sid & Nancy (1986), Cox has spent most of his latter career in the indie margins making low-budget variations on the western genre, riffing on stylistic tropes laid down by Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Corbucci and others. One of his later “microfeatures” was the archly titled Searchers 2.0 (2007), in homage to John Ford’s The Searchers (1956). In 2009 he published a book on spaghetti westerns, 10,000 Ways to Die. On Dead Souls, he even shares writing credits with Gianni Garko, a veteran Italian actor with numerous cowboy B-movie credits.

On first impressions, Cox has made his most overtly traditional western yet in Dead Souls. He initially sticks to period authenticity and naturalistic performances, though he later digresses into formal trickery with pleasingly unpredictable, surreal results. Shot in the desert landscapes of Arizona and Almeria in Spain, the film has a handsome widescreen look. Played by Cox himself, Gogol’s anti-hero Chichikov is here renamed Strindler, a saturnine high plains drifter in a wide-brimmed hat who wanders frontier towns gathering the names of recently deceased Mexican workers as part of a shadowy scheme to scam money from a government census. An angel of death posing as a preacher, his picaresque journey involves gunfights, drunken brawls and shady deals with haughty landowners, crooked sheriffs and racist immigration officials. Everyone here is on the make, sensing a fistful of dollars behind Strindler’s slippery mask of righteous piety.

Cox initially plays Dead Souls with a straight face, but he begins to deconstruct the narrative midway through with post-modern games, meta twists and audience-winking allusions to his previous films. During an unexpected musical interlude, a singing corpse joins the cast to perform “The Streets of Laredo”, a country-folk murder ballad previously recorded by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Joan Baez and others. A brief, bizarre flashback to Strindler’s childhood features Tim Burton-style stop-motion animation and a cryptic nod to the novel’s Russian-language roots. Most strikingly, a feverish dream sequence becomes a doomy prophecy of America’s current incarnation as a military-industrial surveillance state of AI, cryptocurrency and extreme inequality. These broad-brush political statements are hardly subtle but they feel uncomfortably necessary in the Trump era.

Having played only minor cameos in his previous films, Cox brings an engagingly deadpan comic energy to his first starring role as Strindler. A gnarly and impish figure on screen, he underplays the absurd humour and pulls off a fairly credible American accent. The rest of the performances vary in quality, though Levee Duplay stands out as a nakedly corrupt prosecutor. A background chorus of long-time Cox regulars including Dick Rude, Zander Schloss and veteran English punk musician Edward Tudor-Pole also feature in the colourful ensemble cast. The retro-styled animated credits and Dan Wool’s lyrical score feel like further homages to Leone, Morricone, Corbucci and the golden age of spaghetti westerns.

Juggling slapstick humour, political critique, trigger-happy action and surreal tangents, Dead Souls does not always hang together comfortably. Cox has made better films, but this offbeat frontier fable is still a charmingly eccentric, mischievous late-career effort with an impressively strong authorial voice. Now 71, the director has strongly hinted this may be his final feature. If so, he is not quite going out in a blaze of glory, but with his principles intact, proudly reaffirming his indie-movie outlaw credentials to the end.

Director: Alex Cox
Screenwriters: Alex Cox, Gianni Garko
Cast: Alex Cox, Zander Schloss, Dick Rude, Levee Duplay, Amariah Dionne, Brendan Guy Murphy, Sarah Vista, Jesse Lee Pacheco, Edward Tudor-Pole
Cinematography: Chance Falker, Ignacio Aguilar
Editing: Merritt Crocker
Production design: Melissa Woods, Leonardo Giménez
Composer: Dan Wool
Producers: Merritt Crocker, Guillermo de Oliveira
Production companies: Exterminating Angel (US), Zapruder Films (US)
World Sales: Exterminating Angel
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In English
88 minutes