Jane Campion's first feature in twelve years. Benedict Cumberbatch as a 1925 Montana rancher whose interior life the film slowly reveals.
Montana, 1925. Phil and George Burbank are wealthy ranching brothers who have inherited the operation from their father. Phil is the dominant figure — physically commanding, cruelly intelligent, hostile to weakness in any form. George is gentler. On a cattle drive, George meets Rose Gordon, a widowed innkeeper, and quietly marries her. Rose moves to the Burbank ranch with her teenage son Peter. Phil identifies Peter as effeminate and weak, and progressively torments both Rose (who turns to alcohol) and Peter (who works in the medical school and dissects animals as a hobby).
The film tracks the relationships across approximately a year. Phil unexpectedly begins to take an interest in Peter — teaching him to ride, braiding him a rope, suggesting a friendship that may be more than friendship. The film's ending — Phil's death from anthrax contracted from a diseased cowhide Peter has carefully placed in his path — reframes the entire film. Peter, the supposedly-weak boy, has been the controlling intelligence throughout. The film closes on Peter watching from his bedroom window as the family resolves the funeral logistics.
Jane Campion had not directed a feature film between Bright Star (2009) and The Power of the Dog (2021). She had spent the intervening years working on television (Top of the Lake and its sequels) and on personal projects. The Power of the Dog was, in some sense, her return to feature filmmaking — and it produced her second Best Director Oscar nomination, which she won.
Campion is the first woman to win Best Director at Cannes (The Piano, 1993) and the third woman to win Best Director at the Oscars (after Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker, 2010, and Chloé Zhao for Nomadland, 2021). The Power of the Dog confirmed her standing as one of the most-respected working directors. The film's distribution by Netflix produced significant theatrical-window discussion (see our streaming vs theatrical essay); Netflix gave the film a limited theatrical release in autumn 2021 before its streaming launch.
The Power of the Dog's structural achievement is the slow reveal of Phil Burbank's actual interior life. The film opens by establishing Phil as a brutal, cruel rancher whose hostility to Peter and Rose is the film's apparent dramatic engine. As the film progresses, Campion gradually reveals additional dimensions — Phil's intense earlier relationship with the now-deceased Bronco Henry, the hidden interior of Phil's masculinity, the layers of repression that produce his cruelty.
The reveal is delivered without conventional flashback or expository dialogue. Phil's interior life emerges through visual detail (the secret bath in the forest pool, the unworn neckerchief, the magazine pages Phil keeps hidden in his bunkhouse) that the film does not explain. The technique requires patient viewing; first-time viewers often do not register the full dimensions of Phil's character until the third act. Subsequent rewatching reveals the visual evidence throughout.
The film's final reveal — that Peter has deliberately killed Phil with anthrax-contaminated hide — recontextualises the entire preceding film. Peter is not, as the early film suggested, a weak boy bullied by a powerful man. Peter is the structurally controlling intelligence throughout. He has identified Phil's vulnerabilities, manoeuvred Phil into accepting his friendship, then deliberately exposed Phil to anthrax through gloves Phil would not have used had he known the hide's source.
The structural inversion is, by general critical consensus, one of the most-effective in 2010s-2020s American cinema. The audience has been led, across roughly two hours, to misread the power dynamic in exactly the way the film's interior characters have. Phil's central misreading — that Peter is the weak figure who can be controlled — is the audience's misreading. The film does not announce the reveal; it simply lets the closing scenes register, with the audience working out the implications across the final minutes.