The Pow­er of the Dog

The year is 1925. Phil (Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch) owns a ranch in Mon­tana with his broth­er George (Jesse Ple­mons). Near­by, recent­ly wid­owed Rose (Kirsten Dun­st) is try­ing to sur­vive with her son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) by run­ning a small restau­rant. One vis­it from the Bur­banks lat­er and Rose has a new hus­band in George and a new ene­my in Phil. ​“Hel­lo, broth­er Phil,” says Rose on enter­ing her new home, the dark and well-appoint­ed Bur­bank ranch. ​“I’m not your broth­er, you’re a cheap schemer,” he says, as her face crumples.

Dun­st does emo­tion­al heavy-lift­ing as a char­ac­ter who has trou­ble speak­ing, show­ing ragged and dev­as­tat­ed emo­tions as Phil finds new ways to tor­ture her. This is a man’s world and a man’s film – still, the mat­ter of her well­be­ing gives heart to the sto­ry and moti­vates key events. These pow­ers, such as they are, do not serve her. The wild land­scapes of Cen­tral Ota­go in New Zealand (stand­ing in for Mon­tana) are vast, beau­ti­ful and lone­ly. She is trapped. Jon­ny Greenwood’s heavy grind-of-a-score adds to this atmos­phere of claustrophobia.

Cam­pi­on slow­ly extri­cates the indi­vid­ual ele­ments of her tale, with the same method­i­cal pre­ci­sion that Peter – a med­ical stu­dent – uses to dis­sect a bun­ny rab­bit. Strik­ing images leap off the screen, such as Peter’s lanky fig­ure rotat­ing a hula hoop around his hips at dusk. He is a del­i­cate boy who can make ros­es out of paper. Phil uses one such paper rose to light a cig­a­rette, then throws its charred remains into a water jug, where it hiss­es. The next shot shows Rose in the next room framed by a glass door pane, react­ing to this destruc­tion with pain.

The film is pow­ered by the slow-burn enig­ma of who Phil and Peter are. They ini­tial­ly present as two male arche­types in con­flict: the macho man ver­sus the effete boy, yet each is com­posed of lay­ers. The shed­ding of these con­tin­u­ous­ly alters the chem­istry of their rela­tion­ship cre­at­ing a pow­er strug­gle that makes the third act of the film utter­ly grip­ping and hard to pre­dict. The queer sub­text of Savage’s book is dialled up, infus­ing the ten­sion between the two with a sen­su­al­i­ty that adds one more fac­tor to the mys­tery of how this rela­tion­ship will play out.

Smit-McPhee acts Cum­ber­batch off the screen. The latter’s thes­py instincts and over-baked accent (“Well, ain’t that pur­dy”) are no match for his co-star’s com­pelling sub­tle­ty. Indeed, Smit-McPhee is more effec­tive at show­ing inner life than Cum­ber­batch who, for all his grand­stand­ing, is strange­ly opaque. The off-putting ele­ments of his per­for­mance become less dis­tract­ing as the film goes on, yet this review­er spent time while watch­ing think­ing of recast options (Cos­mo Jarvis? Tom Hardy?)

The Pow­er of the Dog is bril­liant and ambi­tious enough to absorb this imper­fec­tion. Cam­pi­on is a mas­ter of inter­twin­ing char­ac­ter and plot, so that a rev­e­la­tion of one nudges the oth­er along. In this, her first film cen­tring male psy­chol­o­gy after a career of female char­ac­ter stud­ies, she makes obser­va­tions about mas­culin­i­ty and pow­er that defy clas­si­fi­ca­tion. She has blown these sub­jects wide open and we can but stand still and try to catch the frag­ments as they rain down.