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“Mesmerising,” “astonishing,” “a masterpiece” – that’s just a smattering of the high praise directed towards Oscar-winning filmmaker Jane Campion’s latest film.

She won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for 1993’s The Piano.

Campion has been taking things slowly since her last feature films, 2009’s Bright Star and 2010’s Emmy-winning Top Of The Lake starring Elisabeth Moss.

But now she’s come back with a bang – an old Western-style bang.

The Power Of The Dog is a tense western that turns Benedict Cumberbatch’s excellent rendition of masculine bravado inside out and outside in, alongside an emotionally nuanced Kirsten Dunst and her off-screen/on-screen hubby Jesse Plemons.

“Hell friggin’ yeah,” writes A.V. Club, “the movies are back”:

The trailer’s centerpiece is Cumberbatch, who has finally settled on an American accent that works for him (because his Doctor Strange one never really did the trick for this writer).

His menacing stares hone in on his brother’s wife Rose (Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst) and her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who makes paper flowers to Burbank’s mocking bemusement.

The film is set in the year is 1925, telling the story of the Burbank brothers, 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 Burbank [Cumberbatch] 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 trailer, ladies and gentlemen:

Cumberbatch, “trading his typically reserved, oft-stilted manner for convincing man-of-the-plains swagger,” seems to drive this movie forward, while the performances from everyone else hold it together.

The Power Of The Dog will be in select theatres from November and on Netflix on December 1.

[source:avclub]