Stuck between George’s passivity and Phil’s antagonism, Rose withdraws into silence and binge drinking with an ease that insinuates that she’s gone down this road before. When George brings his new bride into the Burbank home, whose servants and fine furniture seem ill-suited for the raw Montana setting, Phil makes her stay wretched from day one. When George sets his sights on wedding Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow of marriageable age, that decision presents Phil with a fresh target to distract from his consuming inner misery. The easiest target is his good-hearted but plodding brother, George (Jesse Plemons), whom Phil calls “Fatso” with a tinge of malice that suggests that this isn’t ordinary teasing. The characters’ sense of dissatisfaction is most fully embodied in Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), a cattle rancher who appears utterly expert in every aspect of his profession but also bored and looking for somebody on which to take out his frustrations. The film looks at times like a stiff-jawed period piece, but it ripples underneath with a prickly modern sensibility. Set in 1925 Montana, Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 book tracks the obsessions, miseries, and passions of a group of people who inhabit a cavernous house in the middle of a vast ranchland and make each other miserable until blood is shed. Nobody is where they should be in The Power of the Dog, and everybody seems to be searching for something, somebody, or somewhere else.
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