Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Power of the Dog’ on Netflix, a Tense Character Drama Marking the Mighty Return of Jane Campion

Jane Campion doesn’t make movies very often, and that’s why The Power of the Dog — now on Netflix — feels like a gift. The director of The Piano and In the Cut hasn’t made a movie since 2009’s Bright Star, although she did create and co-direct series Top of the Lake, the first season of which ranks among the best TV of the last decade. Now she adapts Thomas Savage’s 1967 American Western novel The Power of the Dog with an inspired cast, including Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jesse Plemons and especially Benedict Cumberbatch, who may just give the best performance of his career yet.

THE POWER OF THE DOG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Montana, 1925. It’s been 25 years since the Burbank brothers handled their first cattle run. These two men are brothers in name alone: Phil (Cumberbatch) wears chaps and spurs, working the pastures with the men in their employ. He’ll grab a knife and castrate a bull without gloves. He likes to get dirty and likes to stay dirty. He’s brassy, loud, crude, smells ripe as the barn floor. He plucks a banjo as he talks through the door to George (Plemons), who sits in the bathtub. Phil affectionately but also not-so-affectionately calls him “fatso.” George is reserved, thoughtful, tidy, prefers a bow tie and a comb through his hair. They own the ranch and all the heads of cattle and the big house on the land — a house plenty big enough for the both of them, since the Burbanks have a lot of money. But curiously, they still share a bedroom, their skinny twin beds separated by a nightstand.

Phil and George lead their ranch hands to the nearest tiny town for a meal and the company of women and a night at the inn. They eat at the Red Mill, where Rose (Dunst) fries up a chicken dinner and her son Peter waits on them. Peter is what one might call an odd duck. He’s rail-thin, painstakingly crafts paper flowers, talks with a lisp. Phil bullies him relentlessly, uses one of the paper flowers to light his cigarette. Peter steps out the back door and furiously hula hoops. George sits quietly as all the other men file out, hears Rose crying in the kitchen, comforts her. The next day, he helps her serve breakfast. Before long, they’re married and she moves into the brothers’ chilly Moosehead Manor and Peter heads off to school to become a surgeon. Rose gives George a dancing lesson in front of a rugged mountain postcard scene as Phil takes up pen and paper to tattle to their parents, tell them that George has taken up with “the suicide widow.” Phil has to sleep alone in that room now. He goes out to the barn and needlessly beats his horse.

Phil doesn’t take kindly to — well, he doesn’t take kindly to anything. Anything that isn’t riding horses and roping cattle with the men, that is. He ventures into the nearby forest and crawls through a secret wooded thatch to his sanctum, a lakeside spot where he can undress and smear himself with mud and swim and bathe. George buys Rose a baby grand piano and pressures her to play for him, even though she says she only knows “tunes” she learned while playing in the “cinema pit”; his pressure is delicate, but pressure nonetheless. Phil looms over the premises, playing his banjo as she struggles to work her way through a tune, distracting her, belittling her without a single word. She takes to drinking until she is sick and George is kind but chilly and distant. Soon enough, Peter will finish school for the summer and move into a place where he’s unlikely to be welcome or accepted, and we wonder if Campion is arranging the chess pieces so the game can be played out, or if the board can be smashed.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Invoking The Piano and Brokeback Mountain, The Power of the Dog feels like Campion’s Once Upon a Time in the West.

Performance Worth Watching: I sat in thrall to Cumberbatch as he silently shifted from cruelty to semi-redemptive sensitivity, while still maintaining the shroud of menace that keeps his motives tantalizingly opaque. His interactions with Smit-McPhee — who truly comes into his own here — in the film’s final third are a rich confluence of setting, performance, material and direction that feels truly rare and distinctive

Memorable Dialogue: Phil employs projection with no shame whatsoever in his pithy analysis of Peter: “Her boy needs to snap out of it and get human.”

Sex and Skin: Cowboys who are NOT GAY AT ALL splash around naked in the ol’ water hole.

Our Take: So what’s Phil’s damage? He’s magnetic and charismatic, but nasty and divisive, a character at the heart of a terrific ensemble piece: His codependency with George. His rivalry with Rose. His antagonism of Peter. His comradery with the ranch hands. A shrine in the barn immortalizes a man known as Bronco Henry, dead more than two decades now, his saddle and spurs on display. Phil stands in deference only to Bronco Henry’s memory. Bronco Henry Bronco Henry Bronco Henry. Occasionally, Phil gets the saddle down and oils it sensually. Straddles it. Bronco. Henry.

The arrival of the elder Burbanks (Frances Conroy and Peter Carroll) for a dinner with the governor (David Carradine) brings out Phil’s pugnacious rejection of the family’s high-society status, and his upbringing. “So he swears at the cattle in Greek, or Latin?” jokes the governor, a rare moment when Phil doesn’t have full control of tone and narrative at the ranch, and when that happens, shreds of truth are laid bare — his insecurities, his vulnerabilities, his real self. He blows off the dinner. George wanted him to bathe and that wasn’t going to happen. “You tell ’em the truth — that I stink and I like it,” snarls Cumberbatch.

Rose is the outsider at the Burbank ranch, which sits alongside the grand beauty of the mountains, a suggestive and mysterious landscape Campion holds in reverence, in contrast to the restrictive interiors of that big house, with its creepy taxidermy decor and dark-wood walls. The truth is out in the forest, where Phil can be his purest self; whatever happened in that house, be it subtle or overt, poisoned him until his soul was gnarled, and all but silenced George into a kind of numb stupidity. Rose brings her own unspoken trauma to the place, and she feels little but despair, so she self-medicates. Her dear Peter arrives, in pristine white shoes, pristine white socks clinging tightly to bony ankles. He’s a tender and vulnerable target for Phil, who feels — what exactly? Disgust? Or arousal? Peter is a catalyst for change, but what will that change be, exactly? The film holds us in emulsified suspense. The threat of violence, the threat of kindness. Either can be keenly terrifying.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Campion is on point with The Power of the Dog.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream The Power of the Dog on Netflix