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Cold Souls draws easy comparisons to Charlie Kaufman’s work, but its characters—swapping souls willy nilly to feel something else, or nothing at all—are treated far more sympathetically. It’s a strange comedy that stays with you.

“This isn’t an exact science,” says Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) to one of his clients. He’s referring to the thornier details of his company’s work, which is to remove souls from people who’d rather not deal with the emotions and the baggage their soul inevitably accumulates over a lifetime. Time and again, Flintstein reminds his client that there’s so much about the soul nobody knows—what it’s made of, why each person’s soul looks the way it does, and so much more. Flintstein merely presents the option of soul extraction and soul rental; the larger ramifications he leaves to the individual to discover.

The client is Paul Giamatti (playing himself), whose soul is so weighed down with bits and pieces of his many roles that his interpretation of Uncle Vanya (in the Chekhov play of the same name) threatens to pull him down into a numb depression from which he might never emerge. His agent—ha ha—suggests soul extraction and, desperate, Giamatti signs up.

Losing his soul has peculiar side effects. Naturally Giamatti feels no great sense of loss and his depression is gone, but he can no longer read social cues—and he doesn’t much care. Rather than freeing him to play the explosively depressive Vanya, Mr. Giamatti is all over the map on stage. With no soul, he has no way to calibrate emotions.

Distraught (or at least intellectually aware that he should be), Giamatti returns to Dr. Flintstein and decides to rent the soul of a Russian poet, just for the duration of this play. It’s through this transaction we’re given a larger view of the “soul trafficking” trade, an unsubtle metaphor for the very real human trafficking pipeline from Russia and Eastern Europe to America.

The primary trafficker to Flinstein’s company is Nina (Dina Korzun), a “soul mule” who brings the “rental” souls from Russia to America and is pressed into stealing Giamatti’s soul and taking it to Russia. Nina is no villain; she is somber and tragic in that uniquely Russian way, and she quietly mourns her own lost soul. It’s Nina—intrigued by what she saw in Giamatti’s soul—who helps him recover it.

It’s easy to compare the premise if Cold Souls to the work of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, specifically the modern-day fantasies Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. All three films operate on the idea of technology providing a way to deny one’s self: Eternal Sunshine’s Lacuna, Inc. promised to erase painful memories and Being John Malkovich gave its characters a portal into a seemingly more interesting (and ultimately destructive) life.

Cold Souls is less caustic than Kaufman’s creations; writer-director Sophie Barthes is not interested in condemning her characters. The trade exists because there is a steady demand for it—and who do you blame for that? How do you curtail desire?

No, Barthes’ goals are more abstract, and sometimes so nebulous they threaten to detach completely from reality. But there are moments of real gravity here.

Giamatti, a gifted actor with sad and weary eyes, runs the gamut from manic to dead-eyed soullessness—but finds (and displays) beauty when sorting through the pictures and mementos of the Russian poet whose soul he rented. Nina, quiet and resourceful, bravely marches on even though her own soul has been replaced by the fragmentary “residue” of the many souls she’s brought into and out of America.

Believe it or not, Cold Souls is a dark comedy, and many of the laughs are pulled from the relentless (and often very human) refusal to consider the complete implications of soul-removal technology. (The final fate of Soul Storage, Inc., is both hilarious and horrifying and, I have to admit, quite plausible.) Yes, Dr. Flintstein’s procedure should shake both science and religion to their very cores. But who has time to consider such weighty matters when there’s money to be made?

Everyone in Cold Souls possesses some form of this shortsightedness, but it’s a fair observation to say that humanity has a history of breaking the miraculous down to cold numbers and short-term desires. That Nina and Giamatti find some peace and closure in the mess they’ve made of their lives is, perhaps, grace enough.

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