With Benedict Cumberbatch as a jeeringly malicious cowboy in 1920s Montana, Jane Campion’s taut, western psychodrama, her first feature in over a decade, is our best film of 2021
The year’s best film is a western, based on a novel from the 1960s (by Thomas Savage) when the western was a more accepted popular genre in both movies and books than it is now. But it modifies that genre, creating something more elusive and unmanageable: western psychodrama? Western gothic? And it tackles issues around sexual politics, toxic masculinity and family dysfunction in a very contemporary way.
The Power of the Dog is Jane Campion’s first feature film in over a decade, the last 10 years having been mostly taken up with her hit streaming-TV series, Top of the Lake, with Elisabeth Moss. Maybe that project influenced the element of murder mystery in this latest film, whose title is taken from Psalms 22:20: “Deliver my soul from the sword, my precious life from the power of the dog!”
