Teaser Trailer for the 1925-Set Frontier Film THE POWER OF THE DOG with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst

Netflix has released the first teaser trailer for the 1920s set frontier movie The Power of the Dog. The film comes from director Jane Campion, and it has a great cast that includes Kirsten Dunst, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

The film is based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Savage, and the story follows a Charismatic rancher named Phil Burbank, who inspires fear and awe in those around him. When his brother brings home a new wife and her son, Phil torments them until he finds himself exposed to the possibility of love. It certainly looks like it’ll be an intense film, and this trailer offers an unsettling vibe.

Here’s the official synopsis:

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 looks like a solid film worth checking out. It will arrive on Netflix on December 1st.