CINEMA: Cold Souls

If you liked the convoluted, wildly inventive storylines of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, you are going to love Cold Souls.

It’s a wilfully peculiar and extremely funny contemplation of angst, the tortured psyche of the actor, and the nature of the human soul. The fabulous Paul Giamatti plays himself suffering something of a breakdown while performing Uncle Vanya in New York. He feels weighed down by the emotional suffering of his character and so when he reads an article describing how human souls can be extracted and put into storage he immediately books an appointment to see Dr Flintstein (David Strathairn) who agrees to carry out the procedure.

However, Paul is distraught to discover that on extraction his soul looks like nothing more than a rather desiccated chickpea. But this is only the beginning of his nightmare because when he wants his soul back he discovers he’s been given someone else’s soul while his has been stolen by a ‘soul’ mule (Dina Korzun) and been shipped to St Petersburg. So the self-obsessed Paul must embark on a desperate journey to be reunited with his soul in the frozen wastes of a Russian winter.

If your like your comedy to be of the distinctly cerebral kind Cold Souls presses all the right buttons. Not only is the concept at the heart of the story something director/writer Sophie Barthes has endless fun with – extracted souls becoming such a highly-prized commodity there’s a black market in them – but the script glitters with dark dialogue and overshadowing everything is Paul Giamatti’s face, expressing psychic pain, befuddlement, frustration and even indignation all within the blink of an eyelid.

Coldly intellectual indeed, but certainly not soulless.