‘The Power of the Dog’ review: Benedict Cumberbatch stars in 1925 Montana-set drama, reminding us that ‘West’ rhymes with ‘Repressed’

The gorgeous Otago region of New Zealand makes for one hell of a 1925 Montana in “The Power of the Dog,” the first feature written and directed by Jane Campion since “Bright Star” 12 years ago.

This adaptation of the 1967 Thomas Savage novel is worth seeing, and arguing with, for several reasons. It’s a chamber Western, focused on four main characters, and those warring personalities are played by the exactly-right quartet of Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons (Dunst and Plemons are married off-camera) and Kodi Smit-McPhee. The environment these forlorn souls call home works like a spacious dream of the Old West, shortly after it has given way to 20th century notions of progress, including the automobile and the pianola.

Two successive establishing shots early in “The Power of the Dog” capture a long line of cattle against mountains on the horizon, followed by a shot of what appears to be a river of rawhide movement, more liquid than animal. The strongest images here hold their own with the early oceanside sequence in Campion’s best-known work, “The Piano.” This is a director with an indelible eye for the natural world and the people up against it, visually and metaphorically.

Campion adapts the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. The cattle baron brothers George and Phil Burbank have built up their business and bunked in the same childhood bed together since “nineteen and nuthin’,” as Phil (Cumberbatch) puts it. Phil’s the smarter, more calculating of the two. He’s also a casually wily sadist, tormenting brother George (Plemons) by calling him “Fatso,” humiliating the quietly lisping teenage son Peter (Smit-McPhee) of Rose (Dunst). She’s what Phil cruelly dismisses as a golddigging “suicide widow,” working in the apparent sole restaurant in the nearby speck of a town called Beech.

The external conflict in “The Power of the Dog” comes from George and Rose’s marriage, and how it encroaches on Phil’s habits, routines and male sanctum. The internal conflicts, meanwhile, course through everyone’s psyches. As Campion makes perhaps too clear in the adaptation, Phil lives in the memory of his long-dead cowboy mentor and friend, Bronco Henry, whose hallowed saddle Phil treats as a shrine.

By accident one day, young Peter — whose Western duds include a 10-gallon hat resembling the one David Byrne wore in “True Stories” — stumbles upon Phil’s secluded swimming hole, where Phil slathers himself with mud and floats, nude, alone (he thinks) with his thoughts and memories. In this Western, like many others before it, “West” rhymes with “repressed” for a reason. The unseen, long-gone Bronco Henry serves the story the same way Brick’s friend Skipper operates dramaturgically in Tennessee Williams’ “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

When Peter’s not away in town for school, studying to be a doctor like his late father, he coexists uneasily with his mother and stepfather at the ranch home. Phil sees this tender soul (the tenderness hides a will of iron, as we learn) as his personal project. He’s out to make a man out of him, partly for the cowhands’ sport, partly for his own mixed motives. “The Power of the Dog” takes its title from the Biblical Psalm 22:20 (“Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog”), and Campion’s film teases out the themes in Savage’s novel that interest her most: a son’s act of deliverance, and revenge; a society hellbent on homophobia; the emotional and often physical violence that comes from self-loathing.

Everyone’s good in this film, with Cumberbatch’s violently conflicted rancher the instigating tragedy in the making. The character’s pure aggravation at first — a mean-minded bastard in chaps, just begging for his inevitable comeuppance. But there’s a sneaky wit in the performance, with Campion deftly lifting phrases (”What’s in the noodle? Open yer talker!”) from Savage’s novel and inventing a few of her own. Composer Jonny Greenwood’s score is terrific, at times echoing the nervous propulsion of his music from “There Will Be Blood.” Music plays a role in the story, too: At one point Phil (a banjo player) conducts a hostile impromptu duet with Rose (a former silent-movie piano accompanist) as she practices for the wedding announcement dinner party she’s dreading.

Savage’s novel was published the same year (1967) that “Reflections in a Golden Eye” came out in theaters, with Marlon Brando’s nervy, astonishing portrayal of the closeted U.S. Army major first seen in the 1941 Carson McCullers novel. In “The Power of the Dog,” Cumberbatch’s strutting bantam rooster of a man remains trapped inside an idea, a performance, of rugged individualism.

For Campion, the personifications of Western heroism and toughness are practically indistinguishable from their own nightmarish distortions. “The Power of the Dog” lays out this theme pretty bluntly, in a story that can feel a mite thin. It’s also well worth your time, because it imagines the time, place and people it’s about so intriguingly. Campion, cinematographer Ari Wegner, the entire design team knew what they wanted. And got it.

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‘THE POWER OF THE DOG’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPAA rating: R (for brief sexual content/full nudity)

Running time: 2:06

Where to watch: In theaters Wednesday; streaming on Netflix Dec. 1.

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