The trailer for Jane Campion’s The Power Of The Dog might as well be called “Movies are back!”

The Oscar-winning writer-director of The Piano brings Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, and Jesse Plemons to the suspenseful Old West.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  November 4, 2021 | 7:20pm
Aux News Jane Campion
The trailer for Jane Campion’s The Power Of The Dog might as well be called “Movies are back!”
Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons Photo: Kirsty Griffin (Netflix_

Vin Diesel might’ve gotten some of the credit for bringing the movies back with F9: The Fast Saga, but it takes a new film from legendary, Oscar-winning filmmaker Jane Campion to make it true. The director’s latest, The Power Of The Dog, has what we need: lovingly photographed vistas of the American West, slimy tension and emotional fury brought to you by Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst, and the arthouse’s number one boy of the moment Jesse Plemons. Hell friggin’ yeah, the movies are back.

The trailer’s centerpiece is Cumberbatch, who has finally settled on an American accent that works for him (because his Doctor Strange one never really did the trick for this writer). His menacing stares hone in on his brother’s wife Rose (Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst) and her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who makes paper flowers to Burbank’s mocking bemusement.

Here’s the synopsis:

Severe, pale-eyed, handsome, Phil Burbank is brutally beguiling. All of Phil’s romance, power and fragility is trapped in the past and in the land: He can castrate a bull calf with two swift slashes of his knife; he swims naked in the river, smearing his body with mud. He is a cowboy as raw as his hides.

The year is 1925. The Burbank brothers are wealthy ranchers in Montana. At the Red Mill restaurant on their way to market, the brothers meet Rose, the widowed proprietress, and her impressionable son Peter. Phil behaves so cruelly he drives them both to tears, reveling in their hurt and rousing his fellow cowhands to laughter – all except his brother George, who comforts Rose then returns to marry her.

As Phil swings between fury and cunning, his taunting of Rose takes an eerie form – he hovers at the edges of her vision, whistling a tune she can no longer play. His mockery of her son is more overt, amplified by the cheering of Phil’s cowhand disciples. Then Phil appears to take the boy under his wing. Is this latest gesture a softening that leaves Phil exposed, or a plot twisting further into menace?

In a dispatch from the New York Film Festival for The A.V. Club, Vikram Murthi gave the film a mostly positive assessment, focusing on Cumberbatch’s performance as the highlight. Murthi writes:

Campion’s occasional heavy hand often seems at odds with her cast, who instill their characters with nuanced emotions and genuine menace. Cumberbatch especially stands out, trading his typically reserved, oft-stilted manner for convincing man-of-the-plains swagger—a masculinity that Phil himself seems to be performing, for himself as much as for others. His vibrancy both grounds and shakes up the rest of the ensemble.

Though she spent the 2010s spearheading the Emmy-winning Top Of The Lake starring Elisabeth Moss, Campion hasn’t made a feature film since film since 2009’s Bright Star. So we’re happy she could return to movies and bring them back to us.

The Power Of The Dog will hit select theaters in November and stream on Netflix on December 1. Let’s go!

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