The Twist In ‘The Power Of The Dog’ Turns It Into This Year’s Most Potent Love Story

At almost its exact midpoint, The Power Of The Dog collapses in on itself.

— Warning: This article contains spoilers for The Power Of The Dog. — 

The twist, which has generated a great deal of chatter online, sees the ordinary proceedings inverted; the known world turned in on itself. By that stage, the tone has been established, the main players introduced. There is Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch, in the performance of his career), a caustic cattlehand who relishes in the little cruelties he inflicts on those around him. There is George (Jesse Plemons), his brother; Rose (Kirsten Dunst), George’s wife; and the wide-eyed, ruthlessly observant Peter, Rose’s son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, all elbows and knees.)

Power dynamics are established — Phil is the centre of a universe he has constructed entirely through his own rattling will, assembling a team of hangers-on and fellow bullies who he keeps in line by invoking the mythic figure of Bronco Henry, a deceased cowboy who taught Phil everything he knows. The world, it seems, is immovable. This is a desolate place, dotted with lowing cattle, where men are men — dust-swept, silent totems — and women are battered by fates that are outside of their control.

We have seen this kind of film before. Until, suddenly, we haven’t: until Phil retreats to a quiet part of the woods and massages himself with Bronco Henry’s scarf, and we realise, in one short sequence, that the myth of the rugged adventurer consoles Phil in deeper ways than we first imagined.

It is a seismic shift. The world has moved on its axis. Everyone feels it. Masculinity, previously construed, was toxic, locking these aliens in their boots into patterns of violence and hostility that they have long since given up questioning. And then, suddenly, they bloom. Phil is in love not just with a man, the one who introduced him to the lopsided code of ethics by which he has long lived his life and whose dynamic he is perpetually trying to recreate, but with men. There is softness in him where before there was only hard rock; a repressed, desperate yearning to be held by thick bodies, to be slathered in mud, to submit, once and for all, to the musky, lived-in resilience of men and their work.

The world has moved on its axis. Everyone feels it.

From that point on, nothing is set. What seemed like clear lines of power, a criss-crossing network of social relations that lead back to Phil, are revealed to be complex and multi-directional. Phil needs his cattlehands; needs even his brother, who he has spent a lifetime torturing in a myriad of petty, almost imperceptible ways. And, to his side-eyed surprise, needs Peter, who lives his strange limpness in a way that Phil can only dream of.

Jane Campion, the director of Power Of The Dog, has told similar stories in the past. She is an expert at these pivot points; at suddenly and memorably dissolving archetypes, and revealing their crumbling bones beneath. And she understands, perhaps better than any other filmmaker alive, the way that love creates its own meanings; its own little rituals and languages. Sweetie, her debut, was this kind of narrative — the story of a young woman who can only make sense of her great depth of feeling by submitting to strange, supernatural routines, most of which she doesn’t entirely understand herself.

But whereas in the past, Campion has always sent the world that lovers make crashing into the contrasting ethics of the wider community — think In The Cut‘s Frannie, who is made alien by her desires; who always stands in strange, sideways poses to every other human being that she encounters — here the external slips away, leaving only the psychological wilderness of two men in a strange, all-consuming kind of love with one another. Phil and Pete trade codes, swapping routines, braiding themselves together like so much poisoned hide. They slip out of the world around them; take shelter in a barren corner of the landscape, lying under the shadows of mountains.

Their desires create the universe, not the other way around. They no longer see their surroundings the ways that others do. In a key moment, Phil asks Pete to gaze across a ragged collection of hills, and tell him what he sees. A dog, Pete says. Phil is astonished. It is the astonishment that comes over all of us when we realise that we are, against the odds, not alone: that there are others, who we love in complex, reality-shaping ways, that we can invite into our own little corner of meaning, and who can be comfortable there, with us.

Not even death disrupts this community of two. Peter ultimately decides that he must dispatch Phil, for the sake of his mother; that the status quo must be rejected and reformed. But this reshuffling is expressed in the language of the desire that the two have constructed, together: Peter kills Phil with the rope that became a leathery simulacrum of their twinned desires. And then, with gloved hands, Peter slides the rope under his bed, exactly as Sweetie‘s Kay hides the battered tree that she has come to see as a totem of her own bruised and struggling love life.

One of the curious things about love — whether it be romantic, platonic, or sexual — is that these worlds we construct together never entirely go away. We are haunted by the way that we once understood the world, and the person who, for a finite time, nurtured that understanding with us. We either make peace with this haunting, or we don’t.

Peter does. His is a story of becoming; of transformation. Phil is gone but not gone, just as the memory of Bronco Henry never left, just as so many important relationships leave their traces in us, miniature mimicries we enact in the ways that we talk, and move, and mount a horse, shielding our eyes against the low sun.

In a key moment, the night before his death, Phil recounts the way that Bronco Henry once saved his life, laying his body over the younger man like so much tarpaulin. “Naked?” Peter asks. Phil doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t have to. There he is, in the barn, weaving together the rope that will kill him. And there he is, lying in the freezing cold, smelling the rich stink of the man who changed his life, forever.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.

The Power Of The Dog is currently streaming on Netflix.