Film Review “Dead Souls”

Review by

ligiamoreira

 ★★★★½

Alex Cox’s “Dead Souls” isn’t just another Western, it’s a slow-burn fever dream from a director who never learned how to play it safe. Shot across Almería, Spain and Arizona, and loosely inspired by Nikolai Gogol’s 19th-century novel, the film transforms dusty frontiers into moral wastelands. Cox takes the lead himself as Strindler, a wandering conman-preacher peddling salvation one scam at a time.

From the start, it’s clear this isn’t the mythic West, it’s Cox’s West: absurd, political, and uncomfortably human. The cinematography lingers on cracked faces and parched towns like relics of a dying ideology. Strindler moves through them like a ghost, carrying a black notebook full of names, the dead and the damned.

But “Dead Souls” really hits its stride in the jail cell sequence between Strindler and Federal Prosecutor Samuel S. Vistov, played by Levee Duplay. It’s not a classic showdown; they’re separated by iron bars, their power dynamic drawn as much from silence as from words. Duplay delivers one of the film’s most quietly commanding performances, calm, confident, dangerously attractive. And yes, it’s hard not to notice: Vistov is easily one of the most magnetic antagonists to stride into a Western in years. The chemistry between him and Cox gives the scene an uneasy electricity that lingers long after it ends.

The supporting cast reads like a collision of eras: Ed Tudor Pole brings manic brilliance; Zander Schloss (as Boracho, a wink to “Repo Man”) adds a haunting familiarity; Javier Arnal, and Antonio Amate lend old-world gravitas. And then there’s Sara Vista, the real-life country singer who feels born for the screen, all smoky eyes and aching voice, her presence grounding the film’s surreal tone with unexpected warmth.

Just when you think you’re watching a straight Western, Cox detonates the illusion with a futuristic dream sequence that yanks the story into an AI-driven bureaucratic nightmare. It’s bizarre, funny, and unmistakably Cox, a flash of anarchy in an otherwise dust-choked world.

“Dead Souls” might not win over viewers looking for traditional Western catharsis, but that’s the point. Cox has never been about closure; he’s about confrontation. This is a filmmaker coming full circle, staring down the same questions about greed, morality, and identity that haunted his early work only this time, through older eyes and harsher light.

It’s messy, fearless, and defiantly alive. In other words, it’s Alex Cox....