Giamatti stars as a fictionalised version of himself, an anxious, overwhelmed actor who decides to enlist the service of a company to deep freeze his soul.

He has it stored in the clinic and returns to his life with 5 percent of his soul remaining he is told this is like residue, enough to leave him with some emotional reaction, like affection for his loved ones and hobbies but not very deep or complex feeling to new things.

Director Sophie Barthes has stated that she came up with the idea from the film when she had a dream in which she found herself one of several patients at a futuristic doctor's office.

[2][3] According to Barthes, the dream even included Woody Allen and all the patients had a box that an office assistant explained was carrying their extracted souls.

The website's critics consensus reads: "Straddling existential drama and surrealist comedy, Sophie Barthes debut feature is beautifully shot and full of inventive quandaries.

Club wrote Barthes' "attempts to find wry comedy in the kind of restrained, hilariously discomfiting mundanity that gave Being John Malkovich its edge (and that characterizes Charlie Kaufman's work in general) come at the expense of any larger observations or humor about what the soul is, or the advantages and impact of soullessness, in L.A. or elsewhere.

"[10] IndieWire opined that Cold Souls is not as effective a film as the former because it "presumes that we recognize the actor’s persona as fully and immediately as that of, say, John Malkovich.

But when we see the actor breathily rehearsing the title role of Uncle Vanya, chewing scenery before the stage has even been set, we realize that Giamatti’s usual character—at least, the one that Cold Souls wishes to exploit—is paper-thin, working better on the periphery than in the center of the narrative.