English film-maker Alex Cox has ridden into the sunset with his latest and reportedly final film, Dead Souls, a jauntily odd and surreal western shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and Arizona. Cox, known for Repo Man, stars as Strindler, a dapper and cadaverous figure with courtly manners, a fastidious suit and bowler hat, who travels the American old west offering to buy lists of dead Mexicans from landowners.
The story, co-written with veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko, is inspired by Nikolai Gogol's classic novella of the same name, a parable of greed and vanity. In Cox's adaptation, Strindler's sinister plan is to sell these names to government departments as evidence of excluding undesirable aliens, making him a proto-ICE drifter. However, Cox shows that Strindler is outranked in crookedness by everyone he meets, and he is out of his depth, especially when challenged to a gunfight that ends in bloody chaos.
Dead Souls has a distinctive indie-budget look, presented almost as a theatrical chamber piece. Bizarre characters pop up on the parched landscape, dead men raise themselves to sing, and Strindler dreams of being catapulted into a future third world war where he buys names of dead Russians, Chinese and Peruvians. The film is a love letter to spaghetti westerns and a satirical thorn in the flesh of Trumpian politics, with a flash-forward making its contemporary relevance clear.
