Jane Campion fans, take heart. While it’s been a million years since her last feature (2009’s deeply underrated “Bright Star“), she finally returns to the big screen with “The Power Of The Dog. ” which hits the Venice Film Festival this September. Cinephiles will recall Campion’s past success at Venice, as “An Angel At My Table” won the Grand Special Jury Prize there in 1990 (and, some argue, should have won the Golden Lion).
The film follows a cruel ranch owner who mounts a malicious campaign against his brother and his newlywed wife after moving onto his property.
Here’s the official 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.
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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?
Benedict Cumberbatch stars as Phil, and the primary Kirsten Duntz, Jesse Plemons. Thomasin McKenzie, Kodie Smit-Mcphee, Keith Carradine, and Frances Conroy also star, as do Peter Carrol and Adam Beach. Netflix acquired worldwide rights to “The Power Of The Dog” in 2019, and Campion shot the movie in New Zealand’s Otago region in 2020.
Campion has kept busy since “Bright Star” with two critically acclaimed seasons of “Top Of The Lake.” Still, a new Campion film, and a period piece no less, is cause for excitement. Will Campion win that Golden Lion critics feel she’s owed this year? We’ll find out when Venice begins on September 1. “The Power Of The Dog” also has a Special Presentation screening at Toronto International Film Festival and screens as the New York Film Festival in October as the Centerpiece selection (Telluride is rumored too).
“The Power Of The Dog” opens in select theatres on November 17 and premieres on Netflix on December 1. Watch the first trailer below.