The Power of the Dog; Netflix Based on: The Power of the Dog 

The Power of the Dog; Netflix
Based on: The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage

If I were casting a screen adaptation of Thomas Savage’s The Power of the Dog—a 1967 novel about a domineering rancher in 1920s Montana who emotionally terrorizes his gentle brother’s new wife and her effeminate son—I would not, in a million years, have chosen Benedict Cumberbatch to play the volatile, bullying, rough-and-ready rancher Phil Burbank; and yet the lean, patrician-coding Briton is revelatory in the role, perhaps better than he’s ever been. Jane Campion’s first film since 2009’s Bright Star is an extraordinary work, a disquieting examination of a tortured traditionalist masculinity—curdled to cruelty by repressed desire—railing against its threatened obsolescence. Cumberbatch will likely win a raft of awards for this, as will Campion, who has, in coupling soaring vistas of an uncanny ersatz Montana landscape with dread-inducing interior set pieces and lingering shots of male physicality in repose, created the most gothic and oddly sensual western I’ve ever seen.  –Dan Sheehan, Book Marks Editor in Chief