Existing in an epoch in which the rural-urban axis was being transformed via the Industrial Revolution, Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog is an impeccably well-crafted slow-burning thriller that infuses Western Iconography with a subtle game of slowly shifting power dynamics to deliver one of the better thrillers of the year. Interested in the entangled nature of power and desire, and the toxicity and combustibility intrinsic to repression, The Power of the Dog features a narrative schematic that plays within both the economic (class) and social (gender) arenas of this epoch, exhibiting how regardless of the arena, what causes division is the desire for power and control. The shifting power dynamics at play here unfold to reveal a performative side to Cumberpatch's brazen displays of power, and perhaps what the film does best schematically is create a character that despite nearly everything he has done, ultimately feels tragic. His inability to express who he is honestly, both to himself and others is his downfall. This internal maelstrom within his psyche brought by both repression and his inability to let go of his power and control infects the external, leading to his downfall. Cumberpatch has undoubtedly never been better. Ultimately the denouement harkens to something allegorical in the way the power shifts from one man, Benedict Cumberpatch, to the other, Kodi Smit-McPhee. The Frontier is dying, industrialization has upset the social order and driven and repositioned the expectations of worth. The ethos of masculinity, one typically derived and associated with toughness, physicality, and force has been supplanted by this new age, one in which the scientific method and intellectual wit trump brute force - Science has begun to supplant the natural world as the omnipresent force in which mankind finds themselves tethered to as they search for control over the uncontrollable nature of living.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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