The Power of the Dog: The classic Western, now an Oscar and Bafta Award-winning film starring Benedict Cumberbatch

by Thomas Savage

private obstacle became this thing that he knew about himself, something that in the cowboy world he inhabited was terrible and unspeakably vile. Following the code of the west, he remade himself as a manly, homophobic rancher. No one could mistake rough, stinking Phil for a sissy. In that light, his wounding tongue can be seen as preemptive sarcasm

But the boy is as sharp of eye as Phil, and he sees what Phil is doing to his mother and much more. He has chill and watchful ways, a coldness that has always confounded Rose. In a gauntletlike roundup incident, even Phil recognizes something adamantine and courageous about Peter when the boy walks past the ranch hands in stiff new blue jeans after someone has mocked him with a wolf whistle.

‘Oh, he taught me things. He taught me that if you’ve got guts, you can do any damned thing, guts and patience. Impatience is a costly commodity, Pete. Taught me to use my eyes, too. Look yonder, there. What do you see?’ Phil shrugged. ‘You see the side of a hill. But Bronc, when he looked there, what do you suppose he saw?’ ‘A dog,’ Peter said. ‘A running dog.’ Phil stared, and ran his tongue over his lips. ‘The hell,’ he said, ‘you see it just now?’ ‘When I first came here,’ Peter said.fn18 Accompanying the change in attitude

Peter listens stone-faced to Phil’s vengeful rant, but he has his own secret plan, deeply chilling, more awful than any of Phil’s sadistic cruelties, for Peter is already in the big leagues.