127 min | R | November 17, 2021 | Netflix
Two ranching brothers run a Montana cattle operation in 1925. One of them marries a widow, and the other sets out to destroy her. The cruelty is quiet, and that is what makes it lethal.
Phil Burbank is a wealthy cattle rancher who runs a Montana spread with his brother George. He is brilliant, filthy, and savage toward anyone who gets close. When George marries Rose, a widow who runs an inn, Phil treats the marriage as an invasion and Rose as prey. Then Rose’s son Peter arrives for the summer, and the slow war Phil wages against the household curdles into something stranger. Jane Campion builds a Western about masculinity as a performance and the terror of being seen behind it.
Benedict Cumberbatch plays Phil with a banjo on his knee and rage held just under the skin. He weaponizes manners and silence, and Cumberbatch lets the menace leak out through small acts of contempt. Kirsten Dunst plays Rose unraveling by degrees, drinking to survive a house where every kindness has a knife in it. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays Peter as a soft-spoken boy who watches everything and frightens the men who underestimate him. Jesse Plemons plays George as a man too decent and too slow to protect his own wife.
Campion writes and directs the adaptation of Thomas Savage’s novel with total control of tempo. Ari Wegner shoots the New Zealand high country as wide, indifferent land that dwarfs the people fighting on it. The framing keeps Phil watching from doorways and ridgelines, so the camera makes surveillance into a constant threat. Jonny Greenwood’s score works the strings into a low dread that never resolves. The editing withholds, letting scenes run until the silence does the damage.
This is a film about repression and the violence it breeds in the man who carries it. Phil’s cruelty is armor, and the closer anyone gets to the wound underneath, the more dangerous he becomes. Campion never raises her voice, and the restraint is the point. She builds the whole thing toward a single quiet act and trusts the audience to understand what it means.