Film review: The Power of the Dog

The Power of the

The Power of the Dog could just as well be called
The Power of Benedict Cumberbatch, said Deborah Ross in
The Spectator^[1], as he is so
“spectacular” in this “wonderfully complex” western. The
Sherlock actor plays a “ruggedly masculine cowboy” named
Phil who runs a cattle ranch with his brother George (Jesse
Plemons) in 1920s Montana. The pair are opposites: Phil is “clever,
but mean-spirited and cruel”, and so macho he can castrate a bull
with his bare hands; while George is “slower, softer, kinder,
stockier”.

Their equilibrium is upset by the arrival in their lives of Rose
(Kirsten Dunst), a widow who marries George. When she comes to live
at the ranch with her delicate teenage son Peter (Kodi
Smit-McPhee), Phil immediately resolves to make their lives “hell”.
It’s been said the film is about toxic masculinity – but it is more
than that: it explores “the pain of anyone who is expected to be a
certain way, and conforms at the expense of their true identity”.
Phil, a man who knows he will never be loved, is revealed to be as
tragic as he is brutal. 

Director Jane Campion has produced an “indecently powerful”
film, said Kevin Maher in The Times^[2], in which not a line of
dialogue is wasted; and while Cumberbatch is “mesmerising”, he’s
not acting in a vacuum – Dunst too is “formidable”. Campion won an
Oscar in 1994 for her “very different frontier romance”, The
Piano, said Danny Leigh in the FT;
her new film was also shot in her native New Zealand – which
doesn’t quite work (your mind may wander to The Lord of the
Rings). Still, with “a sure touch and epic sweep”, she has
created a film^[3] “loaded with menace but
something rarer too: unpredictability”. This is “potent cinema”
that glints “like a new knife”.