'Dead Souls'
The Cox and the Dead.
Dear Moviegoers,
The grand and proto-independent filmmaker Alex Cox, whose movies often combine anachronisms with confusion and contradiction, has humbly presented what he states as his "last movie," Dead Souls. To what degree this is his last, I'm uncertain. A wink-wink of a tagline? An honest finale to a cooky career? Settled out in begotten parts of wild west-era Arizona, Cox is seated in both the director's chair and the body of the lead role, and, I feel, exists in the third role of a spectating spectre. A final outing for a wild spirit?
A mysterious collector of the dead names of Mexican laborers, Cox plays the newly arrived stranger in town, Strindler, who pays for his immigrant corpse listings with gold coins. Strindler masquerades with differing origins, from businessman to government agent to reverend, covering his tracks and trails in pursuit of these specific names. For someone seeking accuracy, he assumes ambiguity.
Crisp and clean cinematography overrides the dust and dirt of the West in a manner that alludes to both his present capabilities and past romances with genre-bending filmmaking. As the movie unfolds, a potentially biographical portrait of the director himself forms, or at least a memoir to which he has included cherry-picked selections from his life. All at once, Alex Cox's Strindler is written and performed not unlike a soulful vision of one's own existence, leaning through a nexus of time and place, trolling all the way to further escapades beyond this plane of living.
That's a mouthful.
Much in the mold of a mid-chapter William Burroughs book break, Dead Souls makes sense through nonsensical vagueness. It's a mystery through and through, but one that is made of answers and clarity. Each encounter rings of a past movie catalogue of familiar faces and themes, with contemporary meaning. There's not much difference in attitude or action between the late 1800s and the mid 2020s, as everything has been and likely will always be commodified and for sale.
Dead Souls is a dream of now. Sometimes too odd, sometimes too open to interpretation, but never without a cloudiness, slowly moving over pastures and people. A transfixing watch, timed to the tune of a pop-out bird clock.
Could this be Cox's final film? It's a sleight of mischief if so, perfectly articulated in ambiguity and the unnatural order of things. Such is to be expected from a playful patron of the pictures. 3.5/5
Dead Souls will screen as part of the 2026 SF IndieFest, from 2/5 to 2/15.