“Struggling actor” is a cliché through and through, but in Cold Souls actor Paul Giamatti (Paul Giamatti) stumbles on an unique way to eliminate the struggles that come with an artistic temperament: he has his soul extracted.

Tipped off about the process by an article in The New Yorker and desperate for a way to play the lead in Uncle Vanya without coming apart at the seams, Giamatti books himself in and comes out the other side a soulless brother. Well, not entirely soulless – on average they only manage to extract around 95% of the soul, leaving enough behind to keep him animated – but it’s more than enough to give him a new outlook on acting and life.

Unfortunately it soon proves to be a pretty rubbish outlook, as suddenly he’s saying the wrong thing at gatherings and giving cornball performances that leave his fellow actors appalled. Clearly he needs some soul to make it through the day, but with his own soul (revealed upon extraction to be roughly the size and shape of a chickpea) not up to the job, perhaps he’d like to try out someone else’s?

Next stop the sordid world of Russian soul smuggling, where factory workers souls are repacked as poets’ and shipped to the west and gangsters girlfriends demand the soul of Al Pacino to boost their acting career but have to make do with Paul Giamatti’s.

For all the talk of souls this is a fairly lightweight film that works best when its dry sense of humour is on display. The mundane nature of the soul extraction business constantly throws up unexpected laughs, the soulless Giamatti’s appalling acting is played perfectly and Giamatti’s frantic desperation throughout the film is constantly amusing.

It’s when this film tries to explore the more serious side of its brilliant central concept that the road turns rocky. Soul smuggling and soul swapping sounds a lot more interesting than it turns out to be here, and while the gritty realism of the process in Russia makes for a nice contrast with the hi-class dentist’s office that is the New York side of the business, it doesn’t get deeper than that.

In Russia people sell their souls and sometimes want them back but there’s hardly any desperation or excitement there, which doesn’t really make for a gripping finale. Instead the final act of the story fizzles out without much sense of closure or revelation: for all the metaphysical depth promised by a world were people can literally sell their souls, and all the actual comedy that takes place early on, by the end this film turns out to be lacking any real soul of its own.

Cold Souls opens in cinemas on November 26.
You can view the Cold Souls movie trailer here on TheVine.