Trailer: Benedict Cumberbatch is menacing and mesmerizing in first teaser for Jane Campion’s ‘The Power of the Dog’

Netflix has released the first trailer for The Power of the Dog from Academy Award winning writer and director Jane Campion ahead of the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival next week.

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, reveling 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 Power of the Dog stars Academy Award nominee Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Thomasin McKenzie, Frances Conroy, Keith Carradine, Peter Carroll and Adam Beach. It is produced by Emile Sherman, Iain Canning, Roger Frappier, Jane Campion and Tanya Seghatchian and features a technical crew that includes cinematographer Ari Wegner, production designer Grant Major, composer Jonny Greenwood and editor Peter Scibberas.

The Power of the Dog will hit the Venice, Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals before debuting in select theaters on November 17 and on Netflix December 1.