Dead Souls

A mysterious stranger appears on the dusty streets of a small border town—a place boasting little more than a hotel, a saloon, a corrupt sheriff, and an undertaker. Naturally, Alex Cox deliberately plays on our memories of films by directors such as Sergio Leone, or Clint Eastwood. Yet in »Dead Souls«, a very loose and highly topical adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s satirical novel, nothing is quite what we expect. The stranger, played by Cox himself, is neither a gunslinger nor an avenger; he simply wants to purchase the names of Mexicans who have died in this bleak Arizona backwater during the census year of 1890. He never reveals his reasons—posing at times as a census taker, at others as a government official. Only gradually does it dawn on us: the dead are recorded on paper as "successfully removed" individuals—a bureaucratic ruse used to falsify deportation figures and reap bonuses or political capital. Death is reduced to a mere administrative act. The allusion to current US immigration policy is unmistakable. Cox cements his status as one of the most subversive filmmakers since the early 1980s.