'Cold Souls' review

Paul Giamatti (Credit: Adam Bell/Samuel Goldwyn)

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In this mind-bending meta riff, Paul Giamatti plays Paul Giamatti, an actor who has hit a creative slump while rehearsing a New York stage production of "Uncle Vanya." The solution: a company called Soul Storage, which can extract people's souls and keep them in a mini-vault (like your very own metaphysical safe box). Giamatti jumps at the chance to unload his tortured soul, but at a high risk. Turns out, there's a huge black market for disembodied souls, and a Russian cartel has a special interest in the soul of an American actor.

The buzz: It's "Being John Malkovich" meets "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"...with Paul Giamatti. If there's any actor with a bang-up track record of playing haunted souls, it's this guy.

The verdict: A really funny premise is made even funnier by Giamatti's deadpan frumpiness. Writer-director Sophie Barthes creates a quirky world in which soul-extracting (and, we later discover, soul-swapping) is as commonplace as Botox. The contraption in question looks like CAT-scan machine, and when it's done with its hocus-pocus, Giamatti's soul ends up looking like a measly chickpea. The whole shebang leaves him feeling "light, empty and bored," as he tells Soul Storage's big boss (played by David Strathairn), who offers to ship the soul to Jersey to avoid any sales tax. It's the finer points that make "Cold Souls" a canny satire of our need to escape ourselves while aspiring to become someone else, and Barthes finds the right mix of profundity and absurdity to keep the film from entering shmaltz-ville.

Did you know? Barthes initially had Woody Allen in mind for the character, but when she realized that was a pipe dream, she wisely opted for Giamatti instead.

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