The Power of the Dog
Directed by Jane Campion
Running time: 2hrs5 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Benedict Cumberbatch stars in The Power of the Dog
The Power of the Dog is Jane Campion’s first feature film in 12 years, and as if that weren’t enough to make it an event, it’s being widely touted as some kind of radical thematic break in the director’s career: “Aha, at last, one of cinema’s most celebrated feminist filmmakers makes a film about men!” Well, yes and no: masculinity, in a veritable buffet of toxic flavours, is certainly front and centre in this stately, dazzling neo-western fable, which is wince-inducingly perceptive about how men set out to destroy each other for being men in slightly different ways.
But Campion has always known masculinity, in all its conflicts and contradictions, achingly well. It’s there in the possessive erotic oneupmanship between Harvey Keitel and Sam Neill that drives Holly Hunter’s mute heroine spare in The Piano, or in Mark Ruffalo’s tender-tough switch between boorishness and servitude in In the Cut. And it’s all over The Power of the Dog, in which Benedict Cumberbatch’s aggressively alpha Montana rancher spits and swaggers and lords it over his sweetly retiring brother (Jesse Plemons) and the latter’s fey, sensitive stepson (Kodi Smit-McPhee) — until, well, unexpected common ground is found. And dangerous common ground it remains.
That's about as much as I want to say about the story of Campion's latest, which, for all its mesmerising, honey-slow patience of form and pace, is simultaneously a crackerjack tension exercise, packing twists and reversals to make you jolt and shiver in your seat. Yet the suspense here is not merely sensation-based but soulful: this is a film about feeling literally unsafe in your own skin, and the compromises and denials we make to anaesthetise that fear. As a sparse tale of frontier justice and survival in a scarcely civilised stretch of America, it bears comparison with films like There Will Be Blood and McCabe and Mrs Miller, the theatre of Sam Shepard, or the literature of William Faulkner. (It is itself adapted from a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage: rarely have I been so hungry to tackle the source text after seeing a film.)
Yet Campion hasn't buried herself in references and allusions: her voice, and her ongoing fascination with perverse human desire and exchange, rings through the film's macho trappings. I was surprised how often I thought of The Piano, and not just because that very instrument plays a key role in the gradual mental fraying of Plemons' lonely, terrorised ranch bride, beautifully played by Kirsten Dunst. (What was The Piano, after all, if not a frontier western of a sort?) The strange, confrontational comic beats of Holy Smoke! popped into my head too, and not just because Campion again tackles a vast, arid landscape like a feral lover to be tamed. After a decade away from cinema, Campion has returned not just in full, glorious command of her craft — you'll keep pausing for breath at Jonny Greenwood's rattlesnake acoustic score and Ari Wegner's scorched cinematography, full of sunbeams and shadows that slice the frame like machetes — but in proud control of her legacy too.
THE POWER OF THE DOG (2021) Written by Jane Campion | Shot by Ari Wegner | Edited by Peter Sciberras
Selected for the Competition at the 78th Venice Film Festival