By Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo.
Alex Cox, in what may be his final film, smartly reconfigures the classic theme of bureaucratic greed in Tsarist Russia into a bold, timely political Western situated in the borderlands of the 19th-century American West.”
Alex Cox’s newest release Dead Souls (2025), stands as a brilliant adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 absurdist Russian classic, Мёртвые души. Cox smartly reconfigures the classic theme of bureaucratic greed in Tsarist Russia into a bold, timely political Western situated in the borderlands of the 19th-century American West. It turns from Gogol’s sinister fable to a well-placed and thoughtful satire about the effects of immigration, racism, and the long-lived struggle of state power and domination.
This remarkable film, which was the closing night feature at SF IndieFest, from one of the amazing indie genre representatives with such great works as Repo Man and Sid & Nancy, has made visible the decades spent orbiting the Western culture in both his roles as an historian and a filmmaker. His book 10,000 Ways to Die is a perfect admiring reflection on the classic spaghetti Western excess we all know and love.
Taking up from his playful post-Western, Searchers 2.0 (2007), Dead Souls serves as the most reverent salute to the form with its breathtaking widescreen views of the marvelous landscapes of Arizona and Almería, retro-styles animated credits, and evocative score that nudges to Ennio Morricone and Sergio Corbucci, famous for reshaping the sound of spaghetti Westerns each in their own way. It is evident how his collaboration with well-known Italian Western actor Gianni Garko served the film in all the right ways. However, although this work of art offers a great homage to tradition and shows a thorough comprehension of the genre, as the film advances, it gradually starts to deconstruct the logic of the genre from within.
In his lead role as Strindler, a clever reimagining of Pavel Chichikov in Gogol’s classic, Cox takes on what made the original character unforgettable, an undeniable charm of a cadaverous drifter with a special ability to reinvent and represent himself. We can’t quite place him or define him, but that is precisely the game, not knowing if he plays more as a government official or an itinerant preacher, all with the same, unsettling objective: harvesting lists of dead Mexican laborers in exchange for impressive sums of money from landowners. His very shady plan involves, through evident racism and exploitation, to supply the government with evidence of Mexican laborers being kept out of the territory, merely the premise in this probing and reflexive entry.
Cox’s anti-Right-wing statement works as an ideal closing to his career, a final step in a vibrant, career-long engagement with the Western.
Jenny Paola Ortega Castillo is an English philologist and has a master’s degree in cultural studies from the National University of Colombia. She is a literature, writing and reading teacher from Minuto de Dios University in Bogotá, Colombia. Her main research interests are in literature, visual research, television studies and cultural studies.