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Cold Souls

Buzz says:   MPAA Rating: PG-13
Current Showtimes: No showtimes available

Is your soul heavy? Tortured? Would you remove your soul to escape the daily malaise of existence? Paul Giamatti does—unfortunately, soul removal is a complicated issue. Debut writer and director Sophie Barnes toys with ideas of the metaphysical (and metafictional) in her new film Cold Souls.

Paul Giamatti plays a depressed actor named Paul Giamatti who undergoes a cutting-edge medical treatment called “Soul Extraction”. Giamatti feels his soul is becoming too entangled with his latest acting roll—the lead in an Anton Chekhov play—so he pays to have a giant, Ipod-white machine suck it out of him. His soul looks like a chickpea; it is kept frozen, in a glass jar. Somehow, the film gets weirder…

Giamatti misses his soul, but soul-expert Dr. Flintstein (played by David Strathairn) convinces him to choose a new one from a Soul Catalogue: Giamatti chooses the soul of a Russian poet. Still unsatisfied, Giamatti wants his own soul back, but it was stolen by a Russian soul trafficker, and now he must embark on a journey through St. Petersburg to find it.

This film is delightfully bizarre. It takes a clever idea, and matter-of-factly displays its surreal consequences. While similar to Charlie Kaufman’s Being John Malkovich, Cold Souls has more in common with Dostoevsky or Gogol. Like a hefty Russian tome, Cold Souls asks lofty questions of existential crisis—thankfully, Cold Souls isn’t 800 hundred pages long.

Barnes shows her audience that the soul creates art, feels passion, and appreciates grief. Without a soul, Giamatti can only look at his socks or chew celery too loudly. The film is cast in white—the Soul Extraction laboratory, the snow of St. Petersburg, Giamatti even plunges into an all white abyss—to present a world of cold sterility. The soulless look pale and emaciated; life without a soul is not pleasant.

The film is not without laughs however: Giamatti’s freak outs, uncomfortable interactions with Russians, and a fair assortment of silly hats, all make the philosophical musing palatable. Overall, Cold Souls is a provocative exploration of the essence of man, and a goofy, deadpan comedy. Sophie Barnes seems like the next director to watch, and Cold Souls is definitely a film you must see.