The Power of the Dog

This Australian-New Zealand film is based on a 1967 novel of the same name by Thomas Savage about rivalry and conflicts that occur in masculine environments. The film won the Silver Lion for Best Direction at the Venice International Film Festival in September 2021. The screenplay for the movie was written by the film’s director, Jane Campion, and filming took place in New Zealand. Jane Campion brings her film to the screen 28 years after her Palme d’Or, Oscar winning masterpiece, The Piano. The film’s title refers to the text of Psalm 22:20, which makes scriptural reference to the estrangement from God in a desperate situation.

The Burbank brothers, Phil (Cumberbatch) and George (Plemons) work together in 1925 on a remote ranch in the hills of Montana, US, where only ‘strong men endure’. Phil is a Yale-educated scholar, who over time, has become a mean-spirited cowboy, who prides himself on his macho life-style and his brute strength. Phil has become a cruel, rugged and unkempt rancher, who needs to be always in control, and seen to be so. He behaves objectionably, but he is adored by his male ranch-hands. George Burbank, on the other hand, is Phil’s quiet, sensitive, mild-mannered younger brother, whom Phil keeps firmly in check. Suddenly, and unpredictably, George announces that he is marrying, Rose Gordon (Dunst), a town widow, who has a particularly sensitive son, Peter (Smit-McPhee). Rose is dubbed by the towns-people a ‘suicide widow’ because her previous husband took his own life. Phil is furious when Rose and Peter move into his home, and he does all that he can to make their life a misery. He humiliates and ridicules them both, and Rose, bent and cowered by his harassment, turns to drink to cope. Phil is especially angered by Rose’s delicate son Peter, whom Phil belittlingly calls, “Little Lord Fauntleroy. He is both resentful and outraged that his manly fiefdom has come under threat.

The Burbank family is a dysfunctional one. Phil manifests excessive displays of masculinity in an all-male community of cow-hands, and he lives a life that straddles the world of repressed sexual desire. The film analyses homosexuality in macho-male societies, and devastatingly exposes the cult nature of cowboy masculinity. The drama of the action is complemented by outstanding landscape cinematography, and an impressive musical score.

Campion directs the movie with impeccable crafting. Seemingly innocuous events accumulate significance as the film plays on, and the film is filled with scenes of expectant meaning. This is a film where relationships unexpectedly shift, and family secrets surface to prepare the ground for unsettling times ahead. The film’s final, powerful scene reveals all, and in it the viewer learns the dark mystery that lies behind what has happened. Cumberbatch delivers a towering performance as Phil, whose mixture of calmness, bigotry and strength, shift under psychological pressure to show his personality in breakdown. It is one of the best acting performances Cumberbatch has brought to the cinema screen.

This is a thought-provoking film about the wreckage caused by maleness not yet tamed by the environments created to sustain it. The film explores morality by preventing the viewer siding fully with any of the characters involved, and the film digs deep into the inner life of its characters with great subtlety. The film starts off as a socially conscious, psychological drama, but shifts speedily into a display of toxic masculinity (that fits more suitably with a MA15+ classification rating, rather than the one it has been given) that Campion intelligently and creatively brings to the boil. This is a film alive with psychological complexity, outstanding direction, and cinematic energy.