The Power of the Dog

The subtractive test finds very little idle, because the film is built as a trap whose parts are planted in plain view. Peter’s paper flowers, the rabbit he catches and opens on his bed, the gloves he puts on to cut the hide from a cow dead in a gully, Rose giving Phil’s hides away to a trader, Phil’s torn hand, the rawhide rope Phil braids for the boy: each looks like character or incident and each is a piece of the killing. Phil’s refusal of hides from anyone, set early, is what lets him take Peter’s. Even the dog in the hills is the hinge of the bond that kills him. What gives: the Governor’s dinner and the parents’ visit run a little long, and Rose’s drinking goes on past what the plot needs.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: the hard man of the frontier is made by what he hides, his contempt for softness is the guard on his own desire, and his cruelty is a form of grief for the dead man who taught him. Phil alone in the pond with Bronco Henry’s handkerchief, and the magazines hidden in his clearing, show it through image, without a speech. A second disclosure runs against the first: the slight boy everyone despises is the strongest will in the house, and his care is the instrument of murder. What holds the axis below the gate: the closeted bully was well articulated before, in the novel and in the line of Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (8.9), and Rose’s condition is shown more than opened.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Elevation is real and recurs, mostly cold. The hills around the ranch, shot by Ari Wegner as one wide bowl under weather, carry a grandeur the film keeps in view, and the dog in the hillside’s shadow rises each time it returns. Phil castrating bulls bare-handed has a dreadful plainness. The pond is the warm height: a man alone with a handkerchief, the one moment he is soft. The braiding of the rope at night, with a cigarette passed between them, is quiet and terrible at once, since the viewer half knows. Jonny Greenwood’s score lifts and frays the scenes. What holds it at 8.0: the height is a sustained unease more than repeated summits, and the ending lands as a chill rather than a peak.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The film builds rather than evokes in two places. The dog in the hills is a made myth: a sign only the initiated see, which Phil holds as proof of his election by Bronco Henry, and which Peter reads at once, so that the moment of recognition is the moment Phil is lost. The psalm turns the title into structure: the son delivers his darling, his mother, from the power of the dog, and the verse is read over the act. Beneath sit older patterns: the cowboy, guardian of the frontier’s manliness, undone from inside; the weak youth who brings down the giant; the son who avenges the mother. What holds it three tenths below the gate: the frontier myth is dismantled rather than remade, and the older patterns are summoned more than built.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is the western and its revisionist line, McCabe & Mrs. Miller (8.5) and Days of Heaven (8.5) among it, and Campion’s own films of desire and constraint, The Piano (8.2) above all. The turn is real: a western with no gunfight, whose violence is surgical and offscreen, whose plot is a poisoning concealed as a friendship, and whose villain is also its most pitied figure. The stake was considerable for a director who had made no feature for twelve years. But the turn is taken on a proven path: the western as a study of repressed masculinity was the revisionist line’s own work, the plot is the novel’s, and the form, classical in pace and composition, does not risk its audience’s sense of the medium. A real swerve within an accepted kind.

Score: 7.7 / 10

Change the form and the film loses what it knows: that the eye which looks for the strong man will miss the stronger. The film is shot and cut so that the viewer watches Phil, as everyone in the house does, and reads Peter as Phil does, a victim in the making. The pieces of the murder are filmed as Peter’s oddities, not as plans: the gloves, the rabbit and the hide are given no music of menace. The chapter cards divide the film into the time of a slow procedure. The withheld knowledge is released only after the death, in the doctor’s word and in gloved hands sliding the rope under a bed. Told straight, it would be a thriller. What holds it below the top: the Rose chapters are filmed in a more conventional mode.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Five years allow forecast, not evidence. The questions the film leaves are real ones, and early return suggests they hold: when Peter decided, whether before the hides or at the first sight of the dead cow; whether his closeness to Phil was only a lure, or whether he felt something and killed anyway; whether Phil, at the end, was being loved or used, or both. The surface rewards return: on a second viewing every early image is changed by knowledge of the end, which is the formal yield of a well made trap. What holds it at 7.6: a trap’s second viewing is partly a single revelation seen again, some of the depth is the novel’s, and five years is the honest limit of what return can show.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The field is the cinema of the 2020s. Intrinsic force: a western remade as a chamber poisoning, a showing that the genre’s last secret can be told by withholding and by an act of care, and a performance of male cruelty as concealment, done with the restraint the revisionist western had prepared. It is a strong statement in a known argument more than a reorganisation of what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film was received as a major work at once and is a common reference in talk of the western and of masculinity on screen, but whether it has redirected anything is not yet demonstrable after five years, and prizes and a large streaming audience are presence and fame, not effect. That is what holds the axis lowest: considerable force, wide notice, little proven effect.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The film survives whole as released, in one version, digitally made and held. Its presence has been continuous and wide since 2021, chiefly through a streaming service, which is presence, not proof of permanence. The surface is not fixed to its making: set in 1925 and composed classically, nothing in it dates to the 2020s beyond its means of distribution. Against all this stands the span. Five years is a very short demonstration of survival, and at five years, with wide presence and a surface free of its decade, 7.5 is the top of what the elapsed time allows. Presence of five years proves very little.

Score: 7.5 / 10

Command of the medium, in every department. Wegner’s photography holds both the wide land and the cramped house, with framings through windows and doorways that make the house a set of watches, and the light in the barn and at the pond is exact. Greenwood’s score is load-bearing, never commentary: strings and a plucked cello carry Phil’s threat and Peter’s coolness in one idiom. Benedict Cumberbatch builds Phil from the body, the walk, the whittling, the unwashed hands; Kodi Smit-McPhee’s stillness is the film’s secret and he never gives it away; Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst make a marriage of awkward tenderness in very few words. The costs: Rose’s decline is played in repeated beats, George thins to absence in the second half, and the piano scenes press their point.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the castrating of bulls at the start, broad daylight, men’s work, Phil’s knife and bare hands; and the last scene, Peter at his window in a quiet house, watching George and Rose embrace below, with gloves and a rope under his bed. One law governs both: power belongs to whoever can handle the body without flinching, and the hand that cuts is the one that rules. Phil’s hands without gloves and Peter’s hands in gloves are the same law turned. The landscape, the house, the piano, the rabbit and the paper flowers lit for Phil’s cigarette all obey it. The strain is in the Governor’s dinner, a social comedy in a slightly different key, and in Rose, whose suffering is shown in a register of melodrama the rest of the film avoids.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Judged on what a film of about two hours holds. Consciousness, three of them deeply, Phil’s, Peter’s and Rose’s; the family, two brothers bound since boyhood, a widow and her son, the old parents and their money; labour, the ranch’s work of cattle, castration, hides and the men’s bunkhouse; class, the Burbanks as gentry in a land of hands, a Yale classics man among cowboys, the Governor at table; sexuality, kept and hidden; the body, illness and medicine; the West of 1925 with the motor car at its edge; the land and its disease. Held well through the four principals. What holds the axis at 7.5: history and the sacred enter at the edges, the sacred in the psalm only, the Native trader and his son have a single scene, and the state is a dinner guest.

Score: 7.5 / 10