Dead Souls

A mysterious stranger arrives on the dusty streets of a small border town - hotel, saloon, corrupt sheriff, coffin-maker, nothing else. Alex Cox deliberately plays with echoes of Leone and Eastwood, but in "Dead Souls", a very loose adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's satirical novel "Dead Souls", nothing unfolds the way you'd expect.

The stranger, played by Cox himself, is neither gunslinger nor avenger. He simply wants to buy the names of Mexicans who died in this Arizona backwater in 1890 - census year. He never explains why: sometimes he poses as a census official, sometimes as a government representative. It gradually becomes clear that the dead are being recorded on paper as "successfully removed" individuals - a bureaucratic trick for inflating deportation figures. Death reduced to an administrative entry.

The allusion to current US immigration policy is hard to miss. Cox confirms his standing as one of the most subversive filmmakers since the early 1980s.