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The Power of the Dog, New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion’s first movie in 12 years, carries on her long-standing inclination toward the literary. This spare, unsettling, and intriguingly oblique psychological drama is an adaptation of a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage — and it’s a work kept at an intense simmer. It transports us to 1925 Montana and outwardly concerns itself with the ramifications of a new marriage. The union is between George Burbank (Jesse Plemons), a shy, wealthy ranch owner, and Rose Gordon (Kirsten Dunst, giving one of her best performances), a widow who owns a no-frills inn in town with assistance from her introverted teenage son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee). This marriage is unquestionably born more of convenience than passion — George and Rose’s conversations never really move past polite small talk — though would probably warm up a little with time if not for George’s little brother, Phil (a great Benedict Cumberbatch), who also lives on the ranch and, before Rose comes along, is close enough with George to sleep in his bed. 

Phil is an outspoken and consciously hypermasculine counteractive to his mild-mannered sibling, almost always in traditional cowboy garb and preferring to speak loudly and impolitely. He seems to want to repel people, in a lot of ways; the apex of this is his purposeful avoidance of showers. (He almost vindictively smooths fresh mud all over his body before jumping into the neighboring river to clean off his stewing sweat.) Naturally, Phil has hardly even interacted with Rose before deciding he wants her off his property. He thinks she’s a cheap schemer and says as much to her face; he endeavors to put her ill at ease almost as soon as she arrives. When she tries learning a new song on the baby grand George gifts her as a kind of housewarming present, Phil purposely plays the same tune loudly and confidently on his cherished banjo in his bedroom upstairs to assert his superiority. And he antagonizes Peter to get to her, too, practically welcoming his posse of ranch hands to make this awkwardly tall and effeminate boy interested in art and medicine feel even more uncomfortable in his skin than his too-big-for-him clothes ever could. Homophobic jeers hurtle toward him; horses are riled up and then let loose in his direction to make him feel unsafe anywhere other than his bedroom. 

Why all this antagonism? Through some fleeting allusion — a flash of a male nudie magazine hidden in a box, a roundaboutly discussed friendship with a mentor named Bronco Henry, who died recently — the terrorization of Rose and co. and the domineering of the ranch in general seem dysfunctional outlets for someone who would otherwise shatter under the pressure of hinted-at repression. Phil wants power where he can get it. He comes into focus as The Power of the Dog’s primary character after the film’s first stretch, which narrows in on the marriage that sets in motion all this psychological warfare. But we see the other principals no less lucidly, and can feel them, almost, even when they’re offscreen. 

Once a city dweller who got by doing piano accompaniments at silent-film screenings, Rose becomes increasingly tragic as a woman who feels out of place socially, has a husband she thinks is nice but doesn’t necessarily love, and who is constantly made to feel like an intruder in her own home. She turns to liquor to soothe her jitters. This marriage, at one time looked at as a means of survival, has become counterintuitively productive. The big and stylish mansion Rose now lives in, and the miles of mountain-dotted property to which her name is now technically attached, should both be reminders of the abundance at her disposal. But as her feelings of isolation swell they only remind her of her smallness. The numerous landscape shots might normally hit our eyes as straightforwardly beautiful in another movie. But Campion, working with cinematographer Ari Wegner, makes these sweeping vistas feel like they could swallow you whole. 

When Phil’s disdain for Peter softens midway through The Power of the Dog, it’s left ambiguous whether it’s yet another manipulation to dig into Rose’s alcohol-clammy skin or if something more earnest. Maybe it’s an attempt at courtship, given the ranch’s tacit consensus that Peter is perhaps closeted. (Phil, we discover, has a Yale education — he’s a classics major — and may also find some affinity in Peter’s disposition toward academia.) We come to understand, though, that when Peter starts becoming responsive to Phil’s increasing generosity — namely his training the teen how to horseback-ride, and how to braid ropes — Peter has his own intentions lying in wait that create a nervous friction for the viewer. It won’t be long before he has taken for himself some of the control he has, along with his mother, been robbed of. The film finally announces itself as a tale of unexpected revenge; it’s so swift that the movie ends before we can be certain of what we’ve just watched. 

The Power of the Dog may superficially sound like something of a Gothic soap opera about the multifaceted dramas rippling in the aftermath of a hasty marriage. But it proves more interesting than that. It’s not merely a particularly excruciating study of its era’s power dynamics — especially related to how men could toxically alleviate their inner pain exteriorly (like Phil so cavalierly does) in ways women could not — but how the roles people publicly take on to conceal their vulnerabilities, both to others and to themselves, can fracture the more they’re challenged. The ranch becomes a pool of personal pain, its different sources contaminating each other until there’s inevitably some dangerous spilling over. The Power of the Dog’s overhanging tone is so much that of malevolence — it moves along with a kind of suspense that makes you jumpy, and Jonny Greenwood’s score has a restless ghostliness to it that doesn’t help matters — that it almost takes an extra second or two to fully register how sad it is. On this ranch, loneliness is as all-enveloping as the rolling hills that encircle it.