Netflix has released the first teaser trailer for writer/director Jane Campion's highly anticipated new film The Power of the Dog. The drama takes place in 1925 and stars Benedict Cumberbatch as a wealthy Montana rancher who comes across a widowed woman (Kirsten Dunst) and her son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and behaves so cruelly he drives them both to tears. But Cumberbatch's brother, played by Jesse Plemons, takes pity on the woman and intends to marry her.
You don't get much of that story in this teaser, which is more of a mood-setter than a plot-driven trailer — but it does the trick all the same. Cumberbatch is beguiling, and Campion's sharp direction lets you know immediately that you're in the hands of a master. This is Campion's first feature film since 2009's Bright Star, although in the interim she wrote and directed two critically acclaimed miniseries: Top of the Lake and Top of the Lake: China Girl. The Oscar-winning filmmaker behind The Piano has clearly still got it, and I can't wait to see this one. And if you need further convincing, the film's original score was composed by Johnny Greenwood of There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread fame (and Radiohead, of course).
Netflix is positioning The Power of the Dog for awards attention, as the film will have its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on September 2nd. It'll then get a limited release in theaters starting November 17th before hitting Netflix on December 1st.
Watch the first The Power of the Dog trailer below. The film also stars Thomasin McKenzie, Frances Conroy, Keith Carradine, Peter Carroll, and Adam Beach.
Here's the official synopsis for The Power of the Dog:
Severe, pale-eyed, handsome, Phil Burbank is brutally beguiling. All of Phil's romance, power and fragility is trapped in the past and in the land: He can castrate a bull calf with two swift slashes of his knife; he swims naked in the river, smearing his body with mud. He is a cowboy as raw as his hides.
The year is 1925. The Burbank brothers are wealthy ranchers in Montana. At the Red Mill restaurant on their way to market, the brothers meet Rose, the widowed proprietress, and her impressionable son Peter. Phil behaves so cruelly he drives them both to tears, reveling in their hurt and rousing his fellow cowhands to laughter - all except his brother George, who comforts Rose then returns to marry her.
As Phil swings between fury and cunning, his taunting of Rose takes an eerie form - he hovers at the edges of her vision, whistling a tune she can no longer play. His mockery of her son is more overt, amplified by the cheering of Phil's cowhand disciples. Then Phil appears to take the boy under his wing. Is this latest gesture a softening that leaves Phil exposed, or a plot twisting further into menace?