Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog gets a teaser trailer

Adapted for the screen by Campion and based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, the film features a fantastic international cast with Oscar® nominee Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons playing the Burbank brothers, alongside Kirsten Dunst and Kodi Smit-McPhee. A See-Saw Films, Bad Girl Creek and Max Films production in association with Brightstar, The New Zealand Film Commission, Cross City Films and BBC Film, the film is produced by Jane Campion, Tanya Seghatchian, Emile Sherman, Iain Canning and Roger Frappier.

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?

Jane Campion is one of the world’s great directorial talents. Her work in film has also paved the way for many women in the industry. At the 1994 Academy Awards®, she won Best Original Screenplay and was the second woman to be nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Director for The Piano. Campion was also the first female filmmaker to receive a Palme d’Or from the Cannes Film Festival for The Piano.

The film will receive its UK Premiere on Monday 11 October at the 65th BFI London Film Festival venue the Southbank Centre’s Royal Festival Hall, with Campion expected to attend along with key cast.

In select cinemas in November and on Netflix from 1 December.