It seems less a departure than an expansion that Jane Campion, a director who came to prominence with needling examinations of the female psyche, returned to features after a 12-year absence with this brilliantly uncomfortable chamber piece about corrosive masculinity fed by sexual repression. Adapted from the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, the film — which ranks near the very top of Campion’s filmography — casts Jesse Plemons as a gentlemanly Montana cattle rancher who brings his fragile widowed wife and her awkward beanpole son (beautifully played by Kirsten Dunst and a revelatory Kodi Smit-McPhee) to live in their gloomy family mansion, stoking first the cruelty and then the vulnerability of his hard-hearted brother. A never-better Benedict Cumberbatch makes that character a figure of vicious aggression but also a tragic victim of his own macho behavioral codes in a psychodrama whose epic scope is echoed in its majestic landscapes.
2 out of 3 of her 21 Century movies. Not bad! Especially considering the third film, In the Cut, was penned by critics at the time (although it’s still great!).