Movie review: The Power of the Dog is a slow-burning psycho-sexual thriller
The Power of the Dog
★★★★★
‘I stink and I like it,’ Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) tells his brother George (Jesse Plemons) in (12A), and Phil isn’t kidding: the rest of America might be dazzled by the Jazz Age, but Phil is the kind of old-fashioned cowpoke who takes a bath once a year whether he needs it or not.
Clinging to the Old West way of life on the Montana ranch he works with George, Phil feels betrayed when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), and decides to take his revenge on Rose’s sensitive son Peter (Kodi Schmidt-McPhee).
It’s been far too long since Jane Campion directed a feature-length film (2009’s ), but the good news is that it’s been worth the wait: , which Campion adapts from Thomas Savage’s novel, is a gripping drama that works equally well as a slow-burning psycho-sexual thriller and an exploration of masculinity (or, more accurately, masculinities).
Kodi Schmidt-McPhee puts in a terrific turn as the introverted, effeminate Peter who is ridiculed and bullied by the ranch-hands (Peter, reckons Phil, ‘needs to snap out of it and become human’), while the ever-reliable Jesse Plemons offers a more stoical, phlegmatic kind of masculinity: strong, kind and pragmatic, he defies Phil and society at large in marrying ‘the suicide widow’ Rose.
Phil, meanwhile, is the proverbially interesting bunch of guys: a teak-tough outdoorsman, smart but wilfully obtuse, Phil hankers so long and loud for a time when men were men that the audience soon begins to wonder if Phil doth protest too much.
Kirsten Dunst, meanwhile, is brilliantly fragile as the woman pulled asunder by the quarrelling men, a butterfly pinned against the vast and merciless backdrop of Montana at its most majestic, which is beautifully shot by Ari Wegner.
A triumph, then; and let’s hope we don’t have to wait another decade for another Jane Campion film.
(cinema release, Netflix from December 1st)
