The Power of the Dog

dir. Jane Campion · 2021

Snapshot

Set on a Montana cattle ranch in 1925, The Power of the Dog follows Phil Burbank — a violently brilliant rancher who performs roughness as a second skin — as he wages a campaign of psychological cruelty against his brother George's new wife Rose and her slight, bookish son Peter. What appears to be a study in masculine domination slowly reveals itself as something stranger and more dangerous: a gothic chess match in which the apparent victim is the most calculating player on the board. Adapted from Thomas Savage's long-undervalued 1967 novel, the film marked Jane Campion's first feature after more than a decade and stands as one of the defining works of the 2020s: a revisionist Western in the guise of a slow-burn psychological thriller.

Industry & production

The project originated with producer Tanya Seghatchian, who optioned Savage's novel. Campion wrote the screenplay herself, and the film was produced by See-Saw Films (Emile Sherman and Iain Canning), Max Films, and Bad Girl Creek in co-production with Netflix, which acquired global rights. Netflix's involvement guaranteed a large production budget and wide distribution but also shaped the film's release strategy: a limited theatrical run followed by streaming availability, a model that would generate considerable debate during awards season about whether Netflix films belonged in the traditional festival-and-theatrical ecosystem.

Campion returned to New Zealand, her home country, to shoot a film set entirely in the American West. The South Island — specifically the Otago and Canterbury regions — doubled for Montana's high plains and mountains, a substitution that required extensive production design work by Grant Major to plant the right grasses, road textures, and period-accurate ranch architecture across landscapes that otherwise read unmistakably as Aotearoa. The shoot took place in early 2020, threading through the onset of global pandemic disruptions.

Technology

Cinematographer Ari Wegner shot the film digitally on Arri cameras, taking advantage of large-format sensor capabilities to render the New Zealand high country with both grandeur and a quality of watchful menace. The choice of digital acquisition was consistent with contemporary prestige production norms while allowing Wegner to manage the extreme contrast between blazing exterior light and shuttered, lamp-lit interiors. Visual effects work was used judiciously to composite New Zealand skies and terrain elements into a coherent and consistent "Montana," and the production design and location teams worked in close collaboration to ensure that nothing in the landscape broke period credibility. The score by Jonny Greenwood was composed and recorded separately from principal photography, but its integration into the final mix — particularly its relationship to the banjo motifs Phil plays on screen — required close alignment between Greenwood, Campion, and re-recording mixer Christopher Frith.

Technique

Cinematography

Ari Wegner's work on The Power of the Dog is among the most discussed cinematographic achievements of the decade's first half. She treats the landscape as a psychological surface: the mountains that Phil gazes at obsessively conceal, to his eyes alone, the silhouetted profile of Bronco Henry, the older cowhand who mentored and — the film strongly implies — loved him. Wegner moves between two registers with unsettling ease. In the expansive exterior shots, the frame is filled with light-bleached plains and hard-edged ridgelines that communicate both freedom and exposure. In the interiors, she compresses the space: low ceilings, amber lamplight, walls that seem to press in. Close-ups are reserved strategically; when Wegner does push in on Cumberbatch or Smit-McPhee, the effect is almost suffocating. Her framing of Rose's decline — shot glasses, shaking hands, the gradual contraction of her world within the domestic space — is achieved almost entirely through mise-en-scène and camera distance rather than editorial intervention.

Editing

Peter Sciberras edited the film with a deliberate restraint that prioritises the accumulation of atmosphere over event. Cuts are motivated by character attention rather than narrative efficiency: the film withholds and lingers. Sciberras's management of the film's dual temporal structure — the story as lived versus the story as retroactively understood — is central to its success as a thriller. Information is consistently present in the frame before the viewer knows what it means, a technique that rewards and demands re-viewing. The film's pacing has been compared to that of European art cinema, and the editorial rhythm enforces the idea that violence, in this world, is something that accrues rather than erupts.

Mise-en-scène / staging

Campion stages the film's power relations through space and sound before dialogue. Phil occupies rooms; others arrange themselves around him. His entry into any interior changes its geometry. Grant Major's production design establishes the Burbank ranch as a place of accumulated masculine mythology — hides, ropes, the soaking pit where Phil takes his private bath — set against the incongruous refinements that suggest his secret cultivation: hidden books, a beloved banjo. The ranch-house's physical layout externalises the film's social architecture. When Rose begins to drink, her spiral is tracked through where she places herself in the house — progressively smaller rooms, progressively more marginal positions. Peter, by contrast, grows more spatially confident as the film proceeds, a shift almost entirely communicated through staging rather than exposition.

Sound

The sound design by Robert Mackenzie and the score by Jonny Greenwood are inseparable collaborators in the film's texture. Greenwood — who had previously composed for Paul Thomas Anderson on There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread, films all concerned in different ways with the psychology of domination — here writes music that disassembles the Western's traditional heroic register. The banjo, played diegetically by Cumberbatch (who learned the instrument for the role), appears first as a weapon of social humiliation — Phil plays it loudly when Rose attempts to perform piano — before the score gradually absorbs the instrument's timbre into something elegiac and then ominous. Greenwood's strings and prepared piano create an atmosphere of sustained unease rather than declared menace. The film is, for long stretches, very quiet, and that quiet is never neutral.

Performance

Benedict Cumberbatch's performance as Phil Burbank is a career-defining piece of physical and psychological work: a performance of performance, a man wearing roughness as armour. Cumberbatch trained extensively in cowhand skills — rope work, cattle handling, banjo — so that Phil's command of the physical world is never a shorthand or impression but a sustained embodied reality. Against this, Kodi Smit-McPhee's Peter is the film's most complex achievement. Smit-McPhee presents as androgynous, slight, and apparently naive, allowing every other character (and the audience) to misread him as the passive object of others' intentions. His stillness is not passivity but concealment. Kirsten Dunst conveys Rose's dissolution with a rigorous absence of self-pity, her performance stripped of the defenses that might invite sympathy at the cost of clarity. Jesse Plemons, as the quiet, decent George, anchors the film's moral world without ever making George its hero.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The Power of the Dog operates as a retrograde thriller: a film that can only be fully understood backward. Its narrative mode is that of the unreliable surface — what appears to be a character study of cruelty, then a story of unlikely tenderness between a bully and a boy, turns out to be a story of patient, premeditated murder. Savage's novel, and Campion's adaptation, deploy this structure to interrogate the genre conventions that condition the viewer's assumptions: that Phil, as the dominant Western male, is the agent; that Peter, as the gentle outsider, is the object. The film uses those assumptions against itself. Its dramatic mode is elliptical; it respects the viewer enough to leave critical information permanently offscreen, trusting implication over explication.

Genre & cycle

The film belongs to the tradition of the revisionist Western but extends that tradition into territory that is as much gothic and psychological thriller as it is genre Western. The revisionist Western — from the post-studio 1960s and '70s works of Peckinpah and Leone through to Altman's McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) — had always interrogated the mythologies of masculine frontier violence. Campion extends this lineage by centering the West's homophobia and its costs, and by treating the psychological interior as the true site of action. The film sits alongside Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005) as one of the definitive treatments of queer interiority in the Western landscape, though The Power of the Dog is more clinical and more willing to be ruthless about what that repression produces. Within the 2020s specifically, it represents a strand of prestige streaming cinema — formally demanding, festival-oriented — that has partially replaced the mid-budget adult drama once distributed by theatrical studios.

Authorship & method

Jane Campion has consistently worked with material centered on interiority, desire, and the violence that social forms do to private selves. From An Angel at My Table (1990) through The Piano (1993) and Bright Star (2009), her filmography returns repeatedly to the costs paid by people — often but not exclusively women — who cannot contain their inner lives within the spaces available to them. The Power of the Dog shifts her perspective toward the male agent of that containment, asking what it costs him too. Campion adapted Savage's novel closely in structural terms while sharpening its ambiguities; the screenplay leaves several of the novel's more explicit passages as implication, trusting the performances and Wegner's framing.

Wegner and Campion's collaboration was notable for the degree of visual preparation: extensive storyboarding and location scouting established a shared visual language before the shoot. Jonny Greenwood was engaged early, contributing thematic sketches that informed the edit as well as the final score. Editor Peter Sciberras worked in close proximity to Campion throughout post-production.

Movement / national cinema

The Power of the Dog occupies a peculiar position in national cinema terms. It is, on paper, a New Zealand–Australian co-production, shot in New Zealand, directed by a New Zealander, financed in part by Australian producers, and distributed by an American streaming platform. Its subject matter — Montana, 1925, with an American cast — sits entirely outside Antipodean cultural specificity. Yet the film carries traces of what is sometimes called the "landscape gothic" tradition in New Zealand and Australian cinema: the land as something that witnesses and resists human settlement, that carries secrets. The Otago region's light — harsh, angled, prehistoric — does something to the film that Montana itself might not have. Campion's career has always moved between New Zealand and international co-production, and The Power of the Dog is her most cosmopolitan work: genuinely transnational in its assembly, inassimilable to any single national cinema.

Era / period

The film's period setting — Montana, 1925 — places it in the twilight of the open-range West, when the frontier mythology was already becoming available for nostalgic performance. Phil Burbank is explicitly a man who performs an earlier era's cowhand identity while his brother deploys the newer manners of Eastern respectability. The 1920s setting allows Savage and Campion to explore how the codes of Western masculinity were already, by that point, a kind of theatre — a set of gestures inherited and maintained rather than organically inhabited. The film has no nostalgia for this world; the landscape is beautiful and the culture it harbors is shown to be lethal.

Themes

The film's central preoccupation is the cost of concealment: what is destroyed, in oneself and in others, by the lifelong performance of a self one does not inhabit. Phil's cruelty toward Rose and toward what Peter represents is the cruelty of a man who cannot afford to recognise his kinship with them. The film is also, precisely, about masculine knowledge and its weaponisation: Phil uses classical learning as a private superiority and cowhand skill as a public one; Peter uses medical knowledge to kill. The question of who is civilised and who is dangerous is kept systematically open. Secondary themes include the mythology of masculine mentorship (Bronco Henry as absent ideal), the Gothic West as space of buried desire, and the violence of class performance in a supposedly classless frontier society.

Reception, canon & influence

The Power of the Dog premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2021, where Campion won the Silver Lion for Best Direction. It screened at Telluride and Toronto before its Netflix release in November 2021, accompanied by an overwhelmingly positive critical response. At the 94th Academy Awards (2022), the film received twelve nominations — the most of any film that year — and won one: Best Director for Campion, making her only the third woman to win in that category and the first to have received the nomination twice, following her earlier nod for The Piano. The film did not win Best Picture (that award went to CODA), and its presumed frontrunner status collapsing in the ceremony's final hours generated considerable critical commentary. It won BAFTA Best Film and Best Direction. Cumberbatch, Smit-McPhee, Dunst, and Plemons all received acting nominations across major ceremonies.

Looking backward, the film's most direct precursor is Savage's source novel, which had never been adapted and which the film restored to wide readership. Formally and thematically, Brokeback Mountain had made the queer Western critically legible, and Campion builds on that cultural permission while working in a mode darker and less sentimentalised than Lee's film. The gothic interiority of the performances and the slow-cinema structural patience recall both Bresson and Haneke, while the landscape's relationship to psychological life connects the film to Campion's own earlier work. Peckinpah's deconstructed Western masculinity and Altman's drifting observational mode are visible influences on its genre sensibility.

Looking forward, the film's legacy is still settling. It accelerated Ari Wegner's emergence as one of the most sought-after cinematographers of her generation. Jonny Greenwood continued a run of psychologically complex period film scores. For Campion, it confirmed that her standing as one of cinema's essential voices had survived two decades of sporadic feature output. The film's Netflix release model contributed to ongoing industry debate about the relationship between prestige streaming cinema and theatrical exhibition. As a work, it seems likely to remain a reference point for any future attempt to reconcile the Western's inherited generic power with the psychological complexity that genre has long, and often violently, suppressed.