Available on Netflix, The Power of the Dog marks Jane Campion’s foray into the world of platforms. Twelve years after Bright Star, the New Zealander returns to feature films. How did the press welcome his film?
Jane Campion is a special director in the history of cinema. The first woman to receive the Palme d’Or for La Leçon de piano in 1993, she was the only one until this year with the coronation of Titanium from Julia Ducourneau.
She is also a filmmaker who stands out for her portraits of women and the way she looks at the female gender in general. If she did not invent the female gaze, she has always been one of its standard bearers. But with The Power of the Dog, she turns the camera towards the opposite sex and deconstructs a whole bunch of preconceived ideas around masculinity.
To do this, what better than the western – essentially manly genre – to probe the masculine gender? With Benedict Cumberbatch headlining, in perhaps one of her best roles, and Kirsten Dunst, Kodi Smit-McPhee and Jesse Plemons, she’s putting the odds on her side to garner critical praise. . Successful bet ?
What does the press think?
According to Bande à part
The art of love, the origin of violence and the science of revenge, in humans, united in the new incredible film by Jane Campion, have only one goal: to reveal the forces and, above all, man’s weaknesses. With a lowercase. 5/5
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According to Cinemateaser
The mastery of cinema is absolutely total. 5/5
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According to Les Echos
The director of “The Piano Lesson” revisits the western in her own way through a story of obsession and death … “The Power of the Dog” is both a claustrophobic drama and a great spectacle. 5/5
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According to Positive
This cruel fable, astonishingly beautiful and sensitive, questions traditional masculinity and virility through the powerful interpretation of Benedict Cumberbatch. 5/5
According to Le Nouvel Observateur
This superb elegy, both Machiavellian and deleterious, takes the time it takes to lead us on the trail of repressed homoerotic impulses, but not only … 4/5
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According to Les Inrockuptibles
The Power of the Dog tells nothing other than the way in which two characters seemingly closed to each other will gradually open up, accept to be upset by the experience of the other and tame, in a dynamic mixing eroticism and the mutation of the desire for domination into a form of repressed love. 4/5
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According to Les Cahiers du Cinéma
In a much less complete and less refined way than Kelly Reichardt in First Cow or The Last Track, Campion links the colonization of a territory to gender relations. A flamingo lost in the world of cowboys, Pete awakens buried impulses in Phil and ends up questioning the surrounding virilism. 3/5
According to Le Monde
A calibrated and unsurprising drama about toxic masculinity. 2/5
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The Power of the Dog on Netflix: “astonishing in beauty and sensitivity”, “a great show”… what does the press think of the western with Benedict Cumberbatch?