‘The Power of the Dog’ Review: Wild Hearts on a Closed Frontier

In Jane Campion’s staggering take on the western, her first movie in more than a decade, a cruel cowboy meets his surprising match.

A great American story and a dazzling evisceration of one of the country’s foundational myths, Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog” centers on Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a swaggering man’s man. For decades, Phil has been raising cattle on his family’s Montana ranch, a parched expanse ringed by jagged mountains. As hard and isolate, open and defended as the land, Phil has been playing cowboy his entire adult life: He rarely bathes, picks a banjo and castrates bull calves using a blade he then holds in his teeth so he can finish the merciless procedure with his bare hands.

Campion’s touch is more subtle in “The Power of the Dog” although her knife work is similarly swift, sure, inexorable and unforgiving. She’s a fearless director who has never worried about making her audience squirm, and I suspect she enjoyed shooting that castration scene both for its raw, visceral imagery and its ferociously witty resonance. You feel bad for the poor beast (it scrambles away), but it’s the other animal that Campion wants you to see, the one seething with rage and flexing his mastery under the admiring gaze of other men.

The story takes place in 1925, more than three decades after the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed and the same year that Buster Keaton starred in the comedy “Go West.” Time seems to have come to a standstill for Phil, though the Burbank family owns one of the area’s few cars. For a quarter century, he and his brother, George (Jesse Plemons), have kept the cowboy ethos alive at the ranch their parents gave them. They break horses and corral cattle in a world of rough men, but at night, Phil and George retreat to their large, sepulchral Eastern-style house with its carpets, filled bookcases, waiting chess board and menagerie of animal heads lining the dark, wood-paneled walls.