The Power of the Dog, director Jane Campion’s return to feature filmmaking after more than a decade, is a stunningly crafted, brilliantly acted, four-cornered psychodrama with the most haunting ending of the year. What initially seems to be merely a compelling drama of sibling rivalry in the last days of the Old West evolves almost subliminally into a piercing exploration of masculinity and hypocrisy.
Set in 1925 Montana, it centers on two brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jessie Plemons) Burbank, cattle ranchers we first meet as they’re returning home after driving their stock to market. Phil, like most of their ranch hands, is crude and cruel, but unlike them he’s got a vicious wit and can play a mean banjo. George is softer, quieter, kinder, maybe not as smart as his brother but sporting a veneer of civilization and decency.
The group stops at an isolated restaurant run by widowed Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst) and her younger brother Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), an eccentric young man who makes paper flowers and barely speaks above a whisper. After Phil and the ranch hands cruelly mock Peter, George returns to apologize to Rose, and romance sparks between them. With Peter off at medical school, Rose and George wed and she comes to live on the Burbank ranch.
So far, so good. The tension between Cumberbatch and Dunst is raw and frightening, with Plemons set up as the ineffectual nice guy caught between them. Phil talks constantly about “Bronco” Henry, the dearly departed mentor who taught the brothers about cowboy life, and for whom Phil keeps a saddle-shrine in the barn. That’s the first sign that there might be something more intriguing beneath Phil’s filthy, willfully unpleasant surface. There will be more, especially after Peter returns from school to stay with his sister and his brothers-in-law.
It’s invigorating to see Cumberbatch continue to tackle complex, substantial roles in parallel with his Marvel Cinematic Universe stardom. (The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, from earlier this year, is another example.) He may seem an odd choice for such a brutish man, until the film reveals that the Burbank boys come from money and that Phil attended Yale. He’s quite believable, whether castrating a bull by hand or spiriting off to a secluded pond for a spot of skinnydipping. Smit-McPhee, previously seen in The Road, gives a textured performance in a role that could easily have slipped into parody. The rest of the supporting cast includes Genevieve Lemon, who starred in Campion’s very first feature, 1989’s Sweetie; Thomasin McKenzie, a revelation in the recent Last Night in Soho; and veteran Keith Carradine as the Governor of Montana.
Although this is Campion’s first feature film since 2009’s Bright Star, she has kept busy, largely with the excellent television miniseries Top of the Lake and its sequel. (Like Power of the Dog, that project ably exploited the wide-open spaces of southern New Zealand, this time as a stand-in for Montana.) Still, it’s surprising to realize that she’s directed only six features total, and a testament to the consistency and impact of her work. She was, of course, only the second woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar, and it would not be surprising if she became the first woman to be nominated twice next year. (Well, actually, it would still be surprising, since the Academy has taken but baby steps away from its ingrained misogyny, but it would be well-deserved.)
The Power of the Dog takes its title from a verse in the Twenty-Second Psalm: “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.” It wasn’t until a few hours after seeing the film that the relevance of that verse, as well as the import of the film’s final shot, fully registered. The way the various strands of character and story come together in the movie’s final scenes is as intricately symmetrical as the ropes that Phil Burbank braids by hand from cowhide, and Campion is smart enough to trust that her audience will weave those threads together without being spoon-fed. That trust and the ensuing silences make the film’s ending that much more potent, and elevate The Power of the Dog from the good to the great.
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(I was lucky enough to see the film in a theater, and you can be too: while it’s currently streaming on Netflix, it’s also playing at Portland’s Hollywood Theatre and the Salem Cinema for a limited time.)
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THERE’S NO DOUBT that Paul Verhoeven has always been a provocateur, willing to push the boundaries of taste in ways that could be effective and popular (Basic Instinct) or neither (Showgirls). So it’s easy to understand why his latest, Benedetta, has been saddled with the genre portmanteau of “nunsploitation,” which typically refers (as one might guess) to seedy films purporting to expose cloistered carnal conduct for primarily prurient purposes. (Representative titles from the genre’s 1970s heyday include Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun and Sister Emmanuelle.)
But, like Ken Russell’s The Devils and Pedro Almodovar’s Dark Habits, Benedetta has more in mind than just what goes on between supposedly celibate sisters. Based on actual events in 17th century northern Italy, it’s a potent takedown of patriarchal repression and religious hypocrisy, with—don’t get me wrong—several saucy scenes to help the medicine go down.
In a prologue, the title character joins the Convent of the Mother of God in Pescia (near Florence) as a young, devout girl. The earthly concerns of the convent are immediately evident in the haggling over Benedetta’s dowry between her father and the Abbess (Charlotte Rampling, perfectly cast). Twenty years later, Benedetta (now played by the stunning Virginie Efira) persuades the convent to take in a young woman, Bartolomea (Daphne Patakia), and around the same time starts experiencing visions of Christ and painful nighttime seizures. The Abbess assigns Bartolomea to keep watch over Benedetta at night, and, well, one thing leads to another.
After she displays unexplained stigmata, Benedetta displaces the Abbess, and her behavior grows more and more extreme, eventually drawing the attention of the Florentine papal nuncio (Lambert Wilson), who, with patriarchal fervor, decides to get to the bottom of things. Such heretical mysticism, much less lesbian coupling, cannot be tolerated by the Church, yet Benedetta has the people of Pescia in the palm of her hand. (It’s worth checking out the real Bendetta’s Wikipedia page to see the ways truth can be stranger than fiction.)
Efira, who appeared in Verhoeven’s previous film, Elle, delivers a deviously enigmatic performance as Benedetta transitions from humble servant of God to an almost gleeful flouter of conventional morality. And while there are times when Verhoeven is just as gleeful a flouter—witness the use to which the women put a small wooden statue of the Virgin Mary—he does so, as Bendetta may have, as a way to tweak tired tropes about the acceptable sources of pleasure and power.
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It seems that when Verhoeven was making American films, he served up sex the way Americans prefer it: neon-lit, pneumatic bodies writhing conflictedly with lust. Now that he has returned to his European roots, he’s able to present it European-style, shorn of the shameful sheen that permeates our more puritanical approach. Puritanism, really, is what Verhoeven has been butting his head against his entire career, sometimes to better effect than others. Benedetta makes that point explicitly, and continues the director’s late-career renaissance. (Opens Friday, Dec. 3, at Cinema 21)
