The Power of the Dog is a new Netflix film written and directed by Dr Jane Campion and is based off of a novel, the story here concerns Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) who is a hard driving taskmaster cattle hand on a farm in rural Montana in the 1920’s and he is particularly hard on his more soft minded brother George (Jesse Plemons) and he is none too happy when George marries a local girl named Rose (Kirsten Dunst) and becomes stepfather to her son Peter (Kodi-Smit McPhee)
I must confess that I haven’t seen an awful lot of Dr Campion’s previous films, not that I didn’t want to watch them it was really that they didn’t hold a lot of interest for me personally even though there are very accomplished works like the Piano, In the Cut and The Portrait of a Lady but still I checked this film out and it is okay.
Firstly the film has a lot of very nice visuals as one expects from Dr Campion and her along with her cinematographer Ari Wegner create many nice shots of lush mountains, snowy landscapes, dirt tracks and rounding up the herd, all of these moments along with the rustic wooden interiors are very nice to look at and would’ve looked great on a big cinema screen instead of on my TV which is where I watched this movie, the film also has a very nice score by Jonny Greenwood that really adds to the atmosphere of the film.
The film is also anchored by a good cast, Cumberbatch is simply terrific here and if he wasn’t facing stiff competition in Will Smith for King Richard I would have him down to win Best Actor at the Academy Awards for his work here, Phil is a hard driving taskmaster but the harshness of the land and making the farm profitable in such remote areas make you understand almost right away why he is as hard as he is this isn’t a world where softness survives its hard and harsh on the frontier and strength is how someone survives out there and Cumberbatch gives you all of that feeling and more sometimes without you even noticing, its fantastic work.
As for the rest of the cast their okay, Plemons and Dunst play off well against each other though some of their scenes at times feel a little weird given that they are together in real life, Plemons on his own is probably the best I’ve seen him in a film in that he gets to play a character and not a caricature that I didn’t find funny at all, Dunst on her own has some good moments but I didn’t really connect all that much with her character by the end.
As for Kodi-Smit McPhee (Good South Australian kid by the way) he is okay but at times his lisp became a bit of a distraction and also people in this movie a lot of the time tend to talk very softly as if their kinda whispering their lines and I wish they had talked a little louder but again this probably wouldn’t have been a problem for me if I had seen this movie at the cinema instead of at home on my TV.
And so that was the Power of the Dog and its well made and performed but it’s a film I admire more than I love and because of that I thought when it was over that it was fine and okay but not something I would go back to again, 2 and a half out of 5.
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