What’s the best way to deal with those especially dark nights of the soul? Get rid of the soul, of course. That’s the premise of French filmmaker Sophie Barthes’ debut feature, a surreal blend of witty comedy and reflective — please excuse the expression — soul searching.

Except in this case, the soul-searching isn’t just figurative. A soul has gone missing, and its owner, actor Paul Giamatti (playing actor Paul Giamatti) needs to get it back. Giamatti has enlisted the services of a business called The Soul Storage Company on the advice of his agent, after finding himself nearing a nervous breakdown over the emotional rigors of a production of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, in which he is playing the title role. SSC has developed a technology that is able to distill the soul into a physical form and extract as much as 95 percent of it from the body, leaving only a residual trace. Barthes trusts that a nebulous explanation of the process and enough futuristic equipment will be enough to sell the necessary suspension of disbelief. And she’s right.

What Giamatti discovers is that being without his soul isn’t quite the carefree experience all the smiling endorsements in the testimonial video made it out to be. “Soullessness,” his extraction consultant Dr. Flintstein (David Strathairn) explains to him, “has its own peculiarities.” Unfortunately, the cold storage locker with Giamatti’s jar is empty, the contents off to St. Petersburg, sold on the black market to a Russian soap actress under the impression she’s trying on Al Pacino’s soul for size.