Released 11/17, Streaming began on 12/1
Viewed probably early January at home, streamed for a short time on Netflix
IMBd: 7/10
RT Critic: 95 Audience: 82
Critic's Consensus:
Cag: 5 It was a great, even wonderful movie, but I didn't love it (see comments below)
Directed by Jane Campion
Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst
My comments: Talk about a powerful movie! Slow. And dark, very dark. There's no joy at all in this, but it's definitely a thinker! At first I didn't think I liked it much, and my end feeling is similar. But it's a GREAT movie. So hard to rate when you don't really like what happens but it's put together in a spectacular package.
RT/ IMDb Summary: 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?
This hits the nail on the head: In The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion’s first feature since 2009’s Bright Star, two very different brothers come to blows about the best way to run their family’s ranch — and their lives — in 1920s Montana. Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) is greatly displeased when, during a cattle drive, his brother George (Jesse Plemons) becomes smitten with a widowed inn owner named Rose (Kirsten Dunst). She’s the mother of a sweet, gangly, effeminate young man, Peter (the extraordinary Kodi Smit-McPhee), and when she and George marry, Phil makes it his mission to bully and unsettle his new family members: Rose, because he thinks she’s after George’s money, and Peter because of his lisp and gentle ways.
This is a gorgeous, smoldering film with an all-star ensemble cast, anchored by Cumberbatch playing against type as the towering and quietly terrifying Phil. A haunting score by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood leads the audience through the awesome tableaus of the American West (New Zealand, technically) and drip-feeds us with a mounting sense of isolation and dread. It’s a slow build, and for most of the time, I had no idea where this was all heading — which only made its shocking but well-earned ending all the more gratifying. —Shannon Keating
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