Dead Souls
A man dressed formally in a black suit and bowler hat steps into a border town hotel in 1890. Advised that a night's stay is $2 and a week is $12, Strindler (Alex Cox, "Repo Man," "Mad God") makes the clerk's eyes pop when he takes out a sack of gold coins, paying for a week. The man who says he works for the government will soon have folks referring to him as 'the millionaire' as he pays increasingly large amounts for the names of Mexican laborers who have died in "Dead Souls."
Laura's Review: C+
In a film he has declared will be his last, cowriter (with Gianni Garko)/director Alex Cox ("Repo Man," Sid and Nancy") delights with his amusingly offbeat neo Western but frustrates with his very unsatisfying ending. This loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel about American greed may keep those who are unfamiliar with it just what Strindler is up to at first as he engages with increasingly questionable characters.
After joining Mayor Avery Senator (Eric Schumacher), Sheriff Purdy (Brendan Guy Murphy) and mine owner Mr. Oso's (Ted Falagan) poker game (they'll remark on his strangeness when he departs), Strindler looks for City Hall the next morning. Guided toward the back past a bunch of cowboys playing pool, he'll find the mayor in the bath, inviting him to pull up a chair and imbide in the area's ever flowing alcohol. At first the mayor wants to know if he's come about 'the Zamora brothers,' one of whom the Sheriff reportedly shot in the head, then talks the man up as a man of great learning, but what Strindler wants to know about is how many Mexicans have died and for that the mayor points him towards the town's doctor.
Needing a horse, but mounting one ineptly (and backwards), Strindler is teamed up with the town drunk, Borracho (Zander Schloss, "Repo Man," "Straight to Hell"), and a wagon, a pairing that will last throughout the tale as Strindler visits Doctor Stanton (Dick Rude, "Repo Man," "Straight to Hell"), whose wife Rebecca (Karen E. Wright, "Repo Chick") serves him a potion that sounds an awful lot like Coca Cola, before heading to the majestic home of The Widow (Sarah Vista), a mystery beneath a black veil until she appears later for a musical number marking the death of a cowboy.
She wants to sell the man hemp, but when she learns he is interested in dead Mexicans and claims to have had eighteen die in her employ, she's thrilled to receive $10 for their names. When she learns later that Oro got a dollar a piece for his, she'll think Strindler a charlatan and she just may be right for the wrong reason.
Cox creates a man who appears confident in all he does, yet fumbles simple things, cocking a pistol then letting it fall to the floor attempting to holster it. His is a very idiosyncratic performance and he bounces off various townspeople, like the rancher Chandler's daughter Rose (Amariah Dionne), in amusing but increasingly tangled ways. After an evening's entertainment that includes Rose singing a hymn off key and an enthusiastic performance of 'A Night on Bald Mountain' on piano, Strindler finds himself challenged to a shootout by Rose's beau The Kid (Shayn Herndon, "Greenland 2: The Migration"). That turns out to end in Strindler's favor more due to a guardian angel than aim, but after taking out the second Zamora brother (Del Zamora, "Repo Man") on his own, when he enlists Borracho to meet him in El Paso, his luck will have run out. Or has it?
The film was shot in the Spain of Spaghetti Westerns and the American West by cinematographers Ignacio Aguilar and Chance Falkner respectively, featuring classic vistas, dusty towns and remote homes, the passing of time frequently suggested by wipe edits. While the film is frequently funny, its message about American Capitalism and American racism is deadly serious and reverberates in today's news, which is no excuse for Cox to underscore the point by giving Strindler a nonsensical present day dream that pulls us out of his picture. If "Dead Souls" wraps on a bum note, at least we can take away another message, one of unaccountability.
Kino Lorber releases "Dead Souls" in L.A. on 7/22/26. Click here for theaters and playdates.
