A gothic drama disguised as a western (a western noir?), THE POWER OF THE DOG is a film centered on the personal conflicts and sexual tensions that take place when two families that seem to have little to do with each other and combine. whose members play a complicated and perverse game of aggression, attraction and repulsion. Directed by Jane Campion in a tone that is not so far removed –despite the differences in setting– from that of THE PIANO, it is a dark, elegant and somewhat elusive film, a kind of muted thriller that, for a good part of its its footage makes us believe that it is something else.
The film begins by being more or less faithful to the western spirit to which the characters and settings invite, those wide and mountainous landscapes of Montana that, in reality, were filmed in the native land of the New Zealand director and have a more desert than usual one finds in "Western" movies. It takes place in 1925 but, judging by the costumes, the horses and the precariousness of everything you see, it could happen half a century before. In fact, when we see a car moving along a paved road it comes as a surprise.
The people who live there are the Burbank brothers, powerful ranchers from the area, who roam here and there with their entourage of cowboys. Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch) is the leader of the group, a classic bully: manipulative, dominant, aggressive, the kind that scares everyone who comes across it. His brother George (Jesse Plemons) is almost the opposite: shy, quiet, respectful, he lives overshadowed by his charismatic and pedantic brother. Phil is always in his work clothes and hates washing (he only bathes in the river once in a while) while George is always in a suit, impeccable and dapper.
The difference becomes apparent in the first moment that all of the story's key characters cross paths: in a restaurant owned by Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who runs the fancy place where the brothers and ten of his employees reserve a table. The one in charge of serving them is Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee, the great figure of the film), Rose's son, a very skinny and sensitive teenager who makes flower arrangements with paper and lovingly places them on each table. For Phil it will be a chance to bring out his ruder side: he will make fun of the flowers, use them to light cigars and make malicious comments about Peter's effeminate features, hurting him, his mother and making his brother uncomfortable.
From his apologies for his brother's abusive behavior, George begins to develop a romantic relationship with Rose (Plemons and Dunst are a couple in real life). Campion will not give many details about what happens there – the film is divided into numbered chapters and skips some stages – but soon George will announce to Phil that he is marrying her and taking her to live in the house they both share, since her parents live in the city. From then on, the woman will be the perfect victim for Phil's psychological and verbal abuse, who makes fun of the way she plays the piano and humiliates her whenever he can. Since George is hardly ever home, those opportunities are many. And the depressed Rose starts drinking more and more.
Things will get even more complicated when, on college vacation, Peter goes to live with his mother. The boy, who is stranger than he seems (he studies medicine and is given to doing experiments on animals), seems like the perfect victim for Phil. But perhaps things are not so simple there, since the heavy cowboy could well be covering up, through his brusque and aggressive behavior, some past traumas or unspeakable secrets for him. The second half of the film will be arranged as a kind of psychological battle with the constant threat of violence running through it all.
There is, throughout THE POWER OF THE DOG, a sense of terror that runs through everything we see. We know that something is going to explode but we don't know what or when or how or who will be the victim. We imagine that it will start from the aggressive Phil, but all the characters accumulate resentments and fights. We know that the posh parents of the Burbank brothers don't like George very much and, oddly enough, go out of their way for Phil, whose tough exterior belies his politeness and culture. And Rose accumulates frustrations (a piano also plays an important role here) that become heavier with alcohol. Peter, meanwhile, is the most indecipherable. Are you a victim of everyone or are you playing your own game?
THE POWER OF THE DOG is becoming a psychological thriller but always within the calm and ambiguous forms that are the director's specialty. Campion does not emphasize developing suspense in the conventional ways – in fact, everything that happens in the most tense and tense part of the story is somewhat confusing – but rather delving into the complexity of the characters. In this sense, sexual impulses –and the ways in which the characters deal with them– have a fundamental weight from the very start of the film, a theme that runs through the career of the director of EN CARNE VIVA and HUMO SAGRADO.
It is a film that will remind others like DEL MISMISM BARRO, by Robert Altman; THE DECEPTION, by Don Siegel and even GLORY DAYS, by Terrence Malick, in its combination between the intimacy of the drama and the grandeur of the landscape. Perhaps the film lacks, at times, a certain solemnity, as if each step taken by the protagonists, each glance, each silence, were taken too seriously. That gives THE POWER OF THE DOG a somewhat morose tone, conscious of being "something more than a western". But the very development of events – and the tension that Cumberbatch generates every time he appears – revives the film when everything becomes too calm and static.
Jonny Greenwood's music, as is his characteristic, will give a dissonant and strange atmosphere to what we see, also moving away from the classic western modes and perhaps closer to his work in BLOODY OIL, by Paul Thomas Anderson, another movie that works, in more ways than one, for reference here. And even Keith Carradine, a figure of the 1970s revisionist western, has a brief but important role in the film. Winner of the Best Director award at Venice, THE POWER OF THE DOG marks Jane Campion's welcome return to the cinema after twelve years with a film that lives up to the hype. No more, no less than that.
