{"id":13171,"date":"2026-10-08T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/?p=13171"},"modified":"2026-10-03T16:19:17","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T16:19:17","slug":"a-western-built-on-bad-deals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/ohmr\/a-western-built-on-bad-deals\/","title":{"rendered":"A Western Built on Bad Deals"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \t<\/i> Read Time:<\/span>8 Minute, 40 Second <\/div>\n\n <\/div>

MOVIE REVIEW
\nDead Souls<\/strong>
\n –  <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong> <\/strong><\/p>\n

Genre: <\/strong>Western, Drama, Satire
\nYear: <\/strong>2025, 2026 Blu-ray
\nRuntime: <\/strong>1h 28m
\nDirector: <\/strong>Alex Cox
\nWriters: <\/strong>Alex Cox, Gianni Garko, based on the novel by Nikolai Gogol
\nCast: <\/strong>Alex Cox, Zander Schloss, Dick Rude, Amariah Dionne, Brendan Guy Murphy, Sarah Vista, Edward Tudor-Pole, Merritt Crocker, Maria Robles, Karen E. Wright, Eric Schumacher
\nWhere to Watch:<\/strong> available October 20, 2026. Pre-order your copy here: www.kinolorber.com<\/a> or www.amazon.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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RAVING REVIEW: <\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>Alex Cox apparently looked at Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel DEAD SOULS, a story about a man purchasing the names of dead Russian serfs who still existed on government tax records, and decided the natural place to relocate it was the American West. The stranger part is how quickly that decision starts to make sense.<\/p>\n

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Set in 1890 during the U.S. census, DEAD SOULS sends a neatly dressed stranger named Strindler into Arizona looking for the names of dead Mexican laborers. Cox himself plays the traveler, moving from ranches to saloons and government offices with the calm confidence of someone who knows that people will eventually stop asking why he's doing something once enough money appears.<\/p>\n

Strindler isn't especially threatening. He's polite, patient, and almost cheerfully bureaucratic about an enterprise that becomes more disturbing the longer he explains it. Even his name carries the movie's sense of humor. Depending on how closely you're listening, Strindler starts sounding suspiciously like Swindler.<\/p>\n

That joke gets directly at what Cox is doing with the Western. DEAD SOULS has guns, dusty towns, corrupt officials, horses, saloons, and plenty of familiar genre imagery, but the real weapon is paperwork. Nobody needs to rob a bank when the government has already created systems that allow somebody clever enough to profit from people who aren't even alive.<\/p>\n

The original Gogol story dealt with serfs who remained technically taxable until the next census even after their deaths. Cox shifts that mechanism to Mexican laborers living and dying in the American Southwest, transforming a Russian satire about property, bureaucracy, and greed into something that fits disturbingly comfortably inside American history.<\/p>\n

That transition gives the movie its strongest idea. The West has traditionally been sold as a place where people could reinvent themselves, claim land, build fortunes, and escape whatever society they left behind. Cox looks at the same mythology and sees a marketplace where nearly everything has a price, including identity.<\/p>\n

Strindler moves through this world less like a gunslinger than a salesman. He wants names, and everyone he encounters wants to know what those names are worth. Moral objections have an impressive habit of disappearing once negotiations begin.<\/p>\n

Cox is an unusual but effective presence in the role. There's nothing conventionally heroic about Strindler, and the performance doesn't try to manufacture charisma where awkwardness is more useful. He carries himself like a man who has spent so long explaining questionable business arrangements that he no longer considers them questionable.<\/p>\n

That deadpan quality suits the movie's humor. DEAD SOULS is funny without acting like a comedy, often letting absurdity sit in the middle of an otherwise serious scene until somebody finally acknowledges how ridiculous everything has become.<\/p>\n

Zander Schloss, Dick Rude, and Edward Tudor-Pole are among several familiar faces from Cox's past who wander through the production, adding another layer if you've followed his career. Their appearances don't feel like celebrity cameos dropped in for applause. They contribute to the sense that Cox is gathering old collaborators for one more strange trip through material that has interested him for decades.<\/p>\n

Nearly everything here has a handmade quality. DEAD SOULS was crowdfunded and shot on a modest budget between Arizona and Spain, including the landscapes of Almería, long tied to European Westerns. Rather than hiding those limitations, Cox seems comfortable letting the movie look like something assembled through favors, persistence, and people who simply wanted to be there.<\/p>\n

That occasionally works against it. Performances vary noticeably, individual scenes can feel more polished than the ones surrounding them, and the pacing settles into a slow rhythm that won't satisfy anyone waiting for the gunfights promised by the Western label.<\/p>\n

The 88-minute runtime helps. DEAD SOULS may wander, but it doesn't have enough time to become exhausting. Cox lets conversations stretch, and Strindler's scheme reveal itself gradually, trusting that curiosity about what he's actually doing will carry the quieter stretches. Then the movie starts getting considerably stranger.<\/p>\n

Cox moves beyond the relatively straightforward frontier satire through animation, unexpected musical detours, surreal imagery, and glimpses of ideas that clearly aren't meant to remain trapped in 1890. A movie that initially appears committed to its period setting eventually reminds us that Cox has never been particularly interested in following genre rules simply because they're available.<\/p>\n

That looseness can make DEAD SOULS feel disjointed. Some of its strangest moments seem to arrive from another movie entirely, and the tonal shifts don't always transition smoothly. Yet removing them would also remove much of what makes this recognizably an Alex Cox production.<\/p>\n

The strongest connection between those digressions is money. People become numbers, names become assets, death becomes information, and government systems create opportunities for anyone willing to stop viewing human beings as human beings.<\/p>\n

The targets aren't subtle. Cox has spent his career distrusting authority, corporations, governments, borders, and anyone who discovers that bureaucracy can make exploitation look respectable. DEAD SOULS gives him a Western landscape where those ideas can exist before many of the modern institutions he's criticizing have fully taken shape.<\/p>\n

That gives the movie a strange relationship with time. It takes place in 1890, borrows a story published in 1842, uses locations associated with 1960s Spaghetti Westerns, and periodically points toward a future that looks alarmingly familiar.<\/p>\n

The result isn't nostalgia. Cox clearly loves Westerns, and shooting in Almería carries an obvious significance for someone who has spent so much of his career engaging with the genre. DEAD SOULS isn't interested in recreating Sergio Leone simply to prove that it can.<\/p>\n

Gianni Garko's involvement as co-writer makes that connection even more direct. Garko became one of the recognizable faces of the Italian Western through the Sartana films, so having him help reshape Gogol into this odd American-Spanish production creates another bridge between different generations of the genre.<\/p>\n

Dan Wool's score understands that heritage without turning the movie into an imitation. The music occasionally brushes against the sounds associated with Italian Westerns while still leaving enough room for the quieter, stranger tone Cox prefers.<\/p>\n

Something about these influences meeting inside a movie about people trying to assign value to things that don't really belong to them feels fitting. Russia becomes Arizona. Spanish landscapes become the American frontier. Dead laborers become financial opportunities. Old genres become new political arguments.<\/p>\n

The title itself becomes increasingly literal. These aren't ghosts haunting anyone in the traditional sense. The souls are dead because the system has reduced them to entries on paper, useful only because somebody has discovered a way to make those names profitable. That's a much colder idea than supernatural horror.<\/p>\n

DEAD SOULS doesn't always have the resources to make its ambitions land cleanly. The filmmaking can be rough, the performances uneven, and certain surreal turns are more interesting as ideas than as fully realized sequences. There's also a deliberate sluggishness to portions of Strindler's journey that occasionally makes the satire feel less sharp than it could be.<\/p>\n

Yet the imperfections feel connected to the movie rather than pasted over it. Cox has made something that clearly belongs to him, which is becoming increasingly rare in an era where even low-budget films can feel designed to resemble the same polished streaming product.<\/p>\n

If this really is his final movie, something about Cox ending here feels appropriate. He began his feature career with REPO MAN, a punk science-fiction comedy that treated American institutions as inherently suspicious, and decades later he's still poking at many of the same systems. Only now he's doing it from horseback.<\/p>\n

Cox has been careful not to guarantee that DEAD SOULS is actually the end. The crowdfunding campaign may have been called “My Last Movie,” but even he has compared the declaration to musicians who announce farewell tours and eventually return.<\/p>\n

Hopefully that's the case. DEAD SOULS doesn't feel like someone carefully composing a solemn final statement. It's too weird, funny, rough, politically irritated, and willing to wander down bizarre side roads for that. It feels like Alex Cox making another Alex Cox movie.<\/p>\n

For all its inconsistencies, that's ultimately what makes DEAD SOULS worth watching. Its Western setting may belong to the nineteenth century, but the people buying names, exploiting labor, manipulating government systems, and discovering ways to turn human lives into numbers feel considerably less distant. The frontier changes. The business model doesn't.<\/p>\n

Please visit https:\/\/linktr.ee\/overlyhonestr for more reviews.<\/p>\n

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[photo courtesy of KINO LORBER]<\/em><\/p>\n

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MOVIE REVIEW Dead Souls –      Genre: Western, Drama, Satire Year: 2025, 2026 Blu-ray Runtime: 1h 28m Director: Alex Cox Writers: Alex Cox, Gianni Garko, based on the novel by Nikolai Gogol Cast: Alex Cox, Zander Schloss, Dick Rude, Amariah Dionne, Brendan Guy Murphy, Sarah Vista, Edward Tudor-Pole, Merritt Crocker, Maria Robles, Karen E. Wright, Eric […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13172,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/mailnewsgroup.com\/img\/0367\/0367830.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","iawp_total_views":2,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t