Teaser Trailer: Jane Campion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons & Kodi Smit-McPhee
This teaser trailer for Jane Campion‘s The Power Of The Dog is a well cut mood piece (shame about the film’s terrible title). It doesn’t give much of the plot away, but it does pull you in with intrigue – which is what a teaser is supposed to do. The music makes this sound more like a horror, but you know there will be a contemplative aspect to this 1920s set western (set in Montana, shot in New Zealand).
Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons and Kodi Smit-McPhee star in The Power Of The Dog which will open in select cinemas in November before dropping in Netflix on 1 December 2021.
The synopsis:
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, revelling 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?
The teaser trailer:
