Jane Campion’s uncompromising, uneasy 1920s drama delivers a career-best performance by Benedict Cumberbatch and marks a victory for queer films at largeIt was always a little tough to buy the legitimacy of Jane Campion’s dark slow-burn drama The Power of the Dog as the best picture frontrunner.
A difficult film about festering familial resentment and the destructive wounds of forced masculinity, it was a world away from what we’re used to seeing the notoriously risk-averse Academy rewarding, or even nominating in the first place.There’s a distinct, unsettling chill that we haven’t experienced in a winner since 2007’s No Country for Old Men (Campion herself has likened the effect of the two endings), every Oscar since going to something that can be broadly, warmly defined as “the film we need right now”, laughs, tears or both guaranteed by the credits.
But during a season
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