It’s hard to believe it’s been over a decade since the last feature film from Jane Campion. While she was busy in the interim crafting two seasons of Top of the Lake, the New Zealand director finally returned to feature filmmaking with The Power of the Dog. Ahead of a festival run at Venice, TIFF, and NYFF, Netflix will release the film in theaters on November 17, followed by a release on their platform on December 1, and now the first trailer has arrived.
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Thomasin McKenzie, Frances Conroy, Keith Carradine, Peter Carroll, and Adam Beach, along with a score by none other than Jonny Greenwood, the story follows brothers on a Montana farm as complications ensue when one of them brings home a new wife and her son.
Watch the trailer below.
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.
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?
The Power of the Dog plays at Venice, TIFF, and NYFF and opens in theaters on November 17, followed by a Netflix release on December 1.