Jane Campion makes a welcome return to feature film directing after a 12-year hiatus during which she dabbled in television with the excellent neo-noir series Top of the Lake. The New Zealand director — the second of seven women ever to be nominated for a best director Oscar, for her 1993 masterpiece The Piano (she won the best original screenplay Oscar for the same film) — has long been fascinated with unrequited desire and the emotional havoc that it wreaks.
The Power of the Dog is adapted from the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage and offers her rich material for a harrowing psychodrama in which everything is implied but little overtly explained and much left unresolved.
Though it’s been billed as a Western, the film, which is set in the harsh, evocative landscape of Montana in the 1920s, is strictly speaking more a movie that takes place in the West rather than one which belongs to the era of the Old West.
Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons) Burbank are wealthy rancher brothers, inheritors of a successful cattle business from their ageing parents who have retired to the city. George, dressed always in a suit and bowler hat, is the business side of the operation, quiet and respectable, attracted to the trappings of high society and social acceptance. His brother, with whom he shares a room and who relishes in calling him “fatso,” is a very different and darker beast. Dirty, ruggedly hands-on and defiantly chaps-wearing, Phil is a man who seems to represent all the most toxic aspects of Western mythological machismo.
When George meets widower and café owner Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and marries her, bringing his new wife and her effete, sensitive and skeletal medical student son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to Montana, Phil is deeply offended and more than a little passive-aggressively unwelcoming.
As Rose descends into alcoholism and Peter develops a complicated friendship with his new, unpredictable step-uncle, things head towards what would normally be an explosive showdown but here turns out to be something far more layered, unsettling and provocative as we quickly realise that Phil is not everything he appears to be.
Campion and cinematographer Ari Wegner make awesome use of the spectacular landscape of New Zealand, here standing in for Montana, and soundtrack maestro Johnny Greenwood provides one of his typically jarring and moody musical accompaniments that emphasises the dark ugliness that constantly lurks around every corner.
Cumberbatch gives the most against-type and menacingly mesmerising performance of his career, never letting us forget that Phil is the unreliable, dangerously unplayable and ultimately unknowable villain of this claustrophobic, emotionally harrowing chamber piece. He’s well supported by real-life couple Plemons and Dunst and a standout turn from Smit-McPhee, who intelligently captures the delicate balance between innocence and knowing that Peter treads in his too-clean jeans and inappropriately shiny white sneakers.
It all adds up to a subtle but deeply disquieting examination of the intricacies and uncertainties of human relationships set against a majestically beautiful but coolly indifferent landscape. It’s one of Campion’s finest works and one of the most quietly understated but devastating films of a year in which hype has ridden roughshod over the movies more desperately and disappointingly than ever.
• 'The Power of the Dog' is on Netflix.
