The Power of the Dog (2021)

Score: 4.5 / 5

I'm always a little skeptical when one movie sweeps awards and is widely touted as the "best" of the year, and so it took me a while to muster up the energy to open Netflix and finally watch its latest Oscarbait. And now I'm angry that I waited and heartbroken that this one wasn't released in cinemas.

The Power of the Dog is a masterful movie by writer and director Jane Campion, whose films (and miniseries) are usually great anyway. The Kiwi auteur this time shoots her homeland to look like Montana in the 1920s, a bare and beautiful landscape mostly untouched except for lonely, winding paths under rugged hills. Much like the land, the story Campion tells -- apparently adapted from a novel of the same name, for which I'm now hunting -- is bereft of fluff. Uncompromising and straightforward, it centers on the internal lives of a small family on the brink of society, eking out their livelihoods on the edges of what is known. We are given no flashbacks or really much context; any history between characters is mentioned in dialogue and left in the past; instead, we're made to study the faces of these characters in close-up much as we would study a landscape painting, reading paragraphs of detail in the actors' chiseled faces.

Phil and George Burbank are wealthy brothers who run a successful ranch. Upon meeting a widowed innkeeper named Rose (Kirsten Dunst), George (Jesse Plemons) decides to get married, and soon Rose and her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move into the stately Burbank ranch. With George's money, Peter can go to school and study medicine and surgery. Phil, however, is not pleased; his rough-and-tough demeanor and hardworking isolationist attitude have made him the leader of the cowboys, and he sees weakness in his brother's affection. Moreover, he seems to see Rose as a leech on his family's resources, and he hates Peter for his effeminate mannerisms. Even in their first meeting, Phil verbally abuses Peter to the point of Peter leaving the dining hall where he works and Rose crumples into tears; he dominates the atmosphere of any social interaction with sharp words and abject cruelty. Here, he's a wolf in dirty clothes, lashing out at anyone on a whim. Cumberbatch is playing a villain, to be sure, but not as he's done before in The Desolation of Smaug or Star Trek Into Darkness; he's not particularly having fun here, just sinking his teeth into a raw and meaty role for the first time in what feels like ages. I would never have thought of casting him in a Western (August: Osage County was about as close as I expected he'd get to it), but he owns this movie like Phil would.

And while Phil's presence threatens to overwhelm the film, the other characters get a lot of quality time to shine, especially Rose and Peter, who react very differently to Phil's abuse. Rose crumples utterly; as the sex Phil doesn't desire and the leech he doesn't want, she represents an existential threat to him, and so he torments her relentlessly to the point of driving her to suicidal alcoholism and an inability to express herself musically or even verbally. Peter initially hides, a scrawny and limp-wristed kid, before he and Phil strike an uneasy but sudden and intense camaraderie. Doubtlessly feeding into Rose's sense of panic, Phil becomes a sort of mentor to Peter in everything from skinning cows to riding horses, and his influence over the boy remains somewhat mysterious during the latter half of the film. Peter works hard to appreciate and even embrace the rugged masculinity of his frontier foster father-figure, and we increasingly get the idea that Phil's rough exterior is little more than a coping mechanism for unspeakable desires he has long denied himself.

The secrets and desires flying between each character, fascinating in their transparency and fleeting acknowledgments, also inform the aesthetics of the film. Jonny Greenwood's score -- primarily string instruments -- make the sweeping film feel like a chamber piece, one whose notes soar until they zing. You can almost see the ways in which power dynamics shift between characters through the music, and for what is essentially "just" a drama about Western masculinities, the score and color scheme feel increasingly like they could tip into another genre, namely psychological thriller, at any moment. Actually, I'd place this movie in the same vein as American Beauty or Little Children in terms of this kind of tone, and for its acute analysis of American gender dynamics under the constraints of civil respectability. Despite appearing to be a peaceful, relatively uneventful watch, The Power of the Dog is a masterclass in nuance on all fronts, a stunning example of beautiful filmmaking that trusts its audience to do a lot of work in parsing out its delicate, sensuous, emotional strands as if unwinding strings of a rope.