ALEX COX IN DEAD SOULS


TRAILER

Swindler's list

The English-born cult director Alex Cox is best known for Repo Man (1984) and the Sex Pistols biopic Sid and Nancy (1986). Other good efforts include the rakish historical anti-imperialist film Walker (1987), the surreal Western Straight to Hell (1987), and the Spanish-language Highway Patrolman/El Patrullero (1991). His films are notable for their outrageousness and their defiance of American imperialism and Hollywood pretensions. After Walker, about the five-foot American who became president of Nicaragua in 1856, its provocativeness and box office failure wore out his welcome in Hollywood and he was virtually blacklisted for violating a writers' strike, leading him to work in Mexico from 1988 to 1996. After this followed periods working in Liverpool on features to 2007 and there also till 2024 on "microfeatures." For details, see the "Alex Cox" Wikipedia article. He declares that his Gogol adaptation, Dead Souls actually a riff off the spaghetti Western, will be his "last film." Bradshaw's favorable review of it at Rotterdam describes Dead Souls as "a diverting and watchable love letter to the spaghetti west of the movies, and a satirical thorn in the flesh of Trumpian politics."

So what is the original Dead Souls,? It's the epic satirical prose poem by Nikioai Gogol that Vladimir Nabokov, whose book on Gogol is his first important work in English, considered a great satirical masterpiece. (I read it to make my love of Nabokov above most other modern American authors official.) The work follows Pavel Chichikov, a cunning con artist who travels across 19th-century Russia buying "dead souls". Landowners were taxed on their living serfs until the next census, so Chichikov purchases the names of deceased peasants to use as collateral for a massive bank loan. Nabokov considered the overarching subject of the book to be not that plot line but poshlost—a favorite word of his and a term for spiritual poverty and petty vulgarity (but a thing that delighted more than distressed Nabokov).

Cox takes off from Gogol's original premise with a mysterious con man in Arizona in 1890 called Strindler (rhymes with "swindler," also with "Schindler," whose list gets annexed toward the end) who travels around buying up names of dead Mexicans. He's a scrawny, neatly attired, polite, snuff-snorting individual whose identity shifts. Sometimes he's working for the federal government. Sometimes he's a protestant clergyman. Sometimes he's neither of the above. He seeks out wealthy or powerful people, including a sheriff, a mayor, a rancher, a rich widow, snapping up identifies of dead Mexicans he later sells to the Texas Chinese Exclusion Officer (Jesse Lee Pacheco). in a census scam. Along the way Strindler discretely flirts with several women and gets into a duel with the town mayor which he inadvertently wins. He loses to him at cards earlier, saying of each thing, cards, horse riding, etc., that he has done them before "but not lately." As nods to Gogol, the film starts off with a Russian song and toward the end reveals that Strindler was raised in a Russian orphanage.

This story has its own "poshlost." Cox uses 19th-century American frontier greed to satirize modern government corruption, portraying the state as a venal machine driven by profit. He mocks contemporary bureaucracy and immigration policy, framing government involvement as a murderous, bureaucratic grift where human lives are traded for power and wealth. However, the tone of the film is lighthearted, the swindler protagonist seems fairly harmless - except for inadvertently killing someone and desecrating Mexican graves - and the visuals are correspondingly light and artificial - the frontier town facades look like bright paintings.

Cox's Dead Souls goes down easy. He's working well here with some of his regular collaborators, three or four of his previous actors, his regular production partner Merritt Crocker, and his composer Dan Wool, known for Sid and Nancy and Repo Man. The film might fit into the same category of unconventional Western, but it lacks the visionary poetic resonance and the haunting trajectory of Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man, which now ranks as a classic postmodern revisionist Western. Cox doesn't aspire to that, linking himself more with the spaghetti Western (his co-author indeed being icon of the genre Gianni Garko), seeking more just to entertain and provoke a little and make some sharp points along the way, and it doesn't rank among his top tier of films. But it's still worthy.

Dead Souls, 88 mins., premiered at Almería, Spain (one of the two locations, with Tucson, Arizona, where it was shot) on Oct. 9, 2025. It also was shown at São Paulo, Rotterdam Feb. 2026, IndieFest (San Francisco; Audience Best Narrative Feature award), and the Tarkovsky Festival in Russia, Jun. 2026. Released in the US by Kino Lorber, it opens July 22, 2026 in Los Angeles at Laemmle Noho with a post-screening Q&A with select cast and crew.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.