The Media Tourist

Unsettling tale of Old World witchery is sympathetic fable of assimilation

You Won’t Be Alone
Starring Noomi Rapice, Alice Englert and Sara Klimoska
Directed by Goran Stolevski
Rated R
How to Watch: In theaters April 1, 2022

Since prehistory, witches have been regarded, rebuffed and reviled as fearsomely mysterious, magical women whose powers made them a real threat to the order of the world.

And long before they were turned into Halloween costumes, sitcoms and cartoons,

witches and witchcraft were staples of lore and legend dating back into the B.C. era, even appearing in the Old Testament of the Bible. A trio of witches in Shakespeare’s MacBeth, written in the 1600s, famously warned that “something wicked that way comes.” In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy encounters two wicked witches and one fairy-like “good” one. Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer and Susan Sarandon were The Witches of Eastwick; Better Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy stirred up laughs in Hocus Pocus. Elizabeth Montgomery turned wizardry into twinkly weekly primetime pixie dust in TV’s Bewitched, and Melissa Joan Hart was Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.

The deep-rooted “sisterhood” of sorcery is at the tortured heart of this wild, devilishly mesmerizing tale of witchcraft set in the Balkans some five centuries ago. It follows one witch “spirit” as she passes through several human (and non-human) bodies.

And it for sure isn’t a sitcom. The story begins when a baby named Nivena is whisked away by her freaked-out mother to live out an extremely sheltered childhood: She’s imprisoned in a deep, dark rock abyss to hide her from Old Maria, the terrifying necromancer of local legend who visited the newborn soon after birth and chewed off the baby’s tongue for some black-magic mojo. Mom is obsessed about keeping her little girl secluded from the evil always lurking somewhere out there.

And it works for a while—until, 16 years later, Old Maria returns to claim Nivena, now grown into a young woman, and usher her into full-blown witch-hood.

You think you know a lot about witches? How they ride on brooms, keep black cats for companions and cackle as they stir boiling cauldrons? Well, not in this movie, where witches—all victims of some ancient, passed-on curse—must kill and drink blood to survive, a dietary requirement that doesn’t make them necessarily welcome, at least for long, around other people. They regenerate by taking the bodily forms of their victims, and a special two-step process (a searing rip into the chest by the black talons of a witch’s hand, followed by witch’s spit) mean you’re officially into the club. To hasten the transition from one body into a new victim’s body, witches remove their own innards, like unpacking an old suitcase once you’ve arrived at your destination. Being a witch involves a good bit of blood and guts, gristle and self-inflicted de-boweling.

You probably never imagined Sabrina, Samantha on Bewitched or Harry Potter’s Hermione Granger doing anything like that.  

Almost feral after spending her childhood in a hole, and not being able to talk, Nivena (Sara Klimoska, a young Macedonian actress) doesn’t realize, especially at first, that she’s a witch. She has no understanding of the rough life she’ll face on a hard road she didn’t choose; forever a social outcast and outsider, feared, persecuted and often burned alive unless she conceals her identity. But she’ll learn.

“Just you wait,” her witch-mother, Old Maria (British actress Anamaria Marinca), tells her. “Just you wait.”

One of the things she’ll learn is how she’s been bestowed with a cursed immortality; death may be perhaps unpleasant, but it’s not much of a deterrent. Incinerated in the flames of a pyre as a young woman, Old Maria became the stuff of hysteria and cautionary folktales—the child-plucking Wolf-Eatress—who continues to roam the Balkan countryside in her carcass of charred, scarred, ooey-gooey flesh. 

First-time feature writer/director Goran Stolevski was born in the Balkans himself (before relocating to Australia), and the film is steeped in the folktales, and the scenery, of the region during a rather dark and dismal time. It depicts a pastoral place that was especially rough for women, who mostly lived to serve their husbands, in every way—that is, if they weren’t getting raped, beaten or otherwise reminded of their lowly station in the social order. Maybe that’s why witches were such agitators: They were women with shadowy, secretive connections to the natural and supernatural world, and powerful enough to turn the tables and bring down almost anyone, even the strongest of men.

The dialogue is spoken entirely in the authentic “old” Macedonian language of its setting (subtitled into English for American audiences). We hear the inner thoughts of Nivena—who is unable to speak—as stream-of-consciousness bits of inner monologues, which are sometimes quite profound. As she explores everything around her, it’s all new—grass, trees, fields, sunlight, streams of water, tears and laughter. She marvels at every moment of discovery, struggling to figure out what’s what. “Are sparrows snakes? Women wasps? Kisses chains?” she wonders. “Me, devils?”

A lot of viewers will find all of it too challenging, too gory, too dreary, too artsy. Unsettling without being particularly scary, it’s not a spookfest meant to shock, but more an exploration, an existential expedition into what witch like might have been like. As the witch progresses through various incarnations, Nivena takes the form of a woman who’s just given birth (Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actress who starred in the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), a handsome farm boy, a cat, a dog, a donkey and finally a little girl, who grows up to become a young peasant woman (British actress Alice Englert), marrying and bringing her story full circle. Her witch mother, Maria, keeps popping in, mainly to tell her what a bad job she’s doing. Sometimes you wonder which witch is which.

And you gradually come to realize that You Won’t Be Alone isn’t just about witches. It’s a somewhat sympathetic tale of curiosity, enlightenment and exploration, a gritty parable about a woman who wants to be something else, something more, while being burdened less; a woman who became who (and what) she is because of something beyond her control, who wants most of all to be accepted. In an odd way, it’s about life and living and what it means to be fully alive, and the arc of reinvention. It’s a tale of assimilation and integration built around a most unlikely subject, but one with which many people can relate—certainly women everywhere, who’ve been treated as outliers throughout much of history.  

It’s a fright-fest fable with a uniquely feminist streak of scariness, an international cast, and a good bit of witchy weirdness. The world can be a harsh and unforgiving place, especially when you’re always outside looking in—or when your destiny takes a dark, unholy detour.

For anyone who’s grown up looking to witches for silly chills…well, just you wait: This hypnotic, horrific dive into the Old World disturbia is the stuff of nightmares. And if you it leaves you unsettled and a bit adrift in the terrors of something beyond the veil of modern comprehension, well, like the title says, you won’t be alone.

Michelle Yeoh skips across the ominverse in gonzo sci-fi action comedy

Everything Everywhere All at Once
Starring Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan, James Hong and Jamie Lee Curtis
Directed by Dan Kwan & Daniel Scheinert
Rated R

In theaters Friday, April 8, 2022

“Will it go round in circles?” asked singer Billy Preston in his hit song from the 1970s. Well, it will, indeed, and it does—in this gob-smacking gauntlet of action-packed, gonzo sci-fi fantasy about the loopy connectedness of all things.

The circle of Everything Everywhere All the Time surrounds Evelyn Wang (Michelle Yeoh), a Chinese immigrant in Southern California who’s become the exhausted, micro-managing proprietress of a laundromat business she inherited from her father (James Hong). Awash in business problems, she meets with a cantankerous IRS agent (Jamie Lee Curtis), who gives Evelyn a hard time…and a hard deadline for getting her affairs in order.

But an audit isn’t Evelyn’s biggest problem, by far, as she’s thrown into a sprawling, mind-blowing comedically cosmic adventure that plugs her into all the other parallel lives she’s ever lived, across the universe—and in other universes, too. And she learns she’s been chosen to lead the resistance against an omnipresent dark force threatening to destroy the entire omniverse, which links everything, everywhere, all the time.

You’ve probably seen Yeoh, who parlayed her success as a Hong Kong action star to noteworthy supporting roles in the Hollywood mainstream, in movies including Last Christmas and Crazy Rich Asians, and in TV’s Star Trek: Discovery franchise. But this marks her first leading role in an American film, and she totally rocks it, grounding the serio-comic shenanigans in a character who creates the zippy, zappy center of every scene. Evelyn is woman who’s told she’s been a failure, at least on the surface, at most everything she’s ever attempted or tried to do. Now she has an opportunity for success in a most spectacular fashion.

Stephanie Hsu, who played Mai on The Marvelous Ms. Maisel, is Evelyn’s daughter, Joy, whose sunny name belies an inner misery and some serious multi-dimensional clouds. You might recognize Ke Huy Quan, who does a bravura job as Waymand, Evelyn’s husband. (As a child actor, Quan played Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Data in Goonies.) He may seem like a milquetoast, happy-go-lucky husband, but wait until you see Waymand’s parallel selves—as a multiverse warrior and strategist, or a debonair, handsome hunk—and how he can turn even an innocuous fanny pack into a fierce fighting tool.

Scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis—the veteran star of the original Halloween, plus more than 80 other movie and TV projects—camps it up as a frumpy government employee in one universe while pursuing a much more sinister agenda in another.

Worlds collide in a wild, frenetic, crossover mishmash as Evelyn finds herself morphing in and out of multiple versions of herself—as a chef, a prison con, a movie star and a singer, a kung-fu expert, a dominatrix and even a pinata and a sentient rock. The filmmaking team of directors Kwan and Scheinert, who collaborate as The Daniels, create a breathless explosion of riotous metaphysical mayhem as she zips and zaps her way across dozens of other parallel “existences” to fulfill her destiny.

The theme isn’t exactly a new one; other films have aggressively tweaked our perceptions of reality, like The Matrix, Inception, The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai and Time Bandits. But none of those films has as much unhinged, unruly playfulness as this one, with a racoon food maestro, a weaponized lap dog (within a frisky cameo by comedian Jenny Slate), people with hot dogs for fingers and a couple of outrageously salacious gags involving sex toys. Nor have other movies ever noted the multidimensional benefits of paper cuts, eating lip balm, sitting on the crack between couch cushions and reusing chewing gum.

This far-out film has all that, and much more.

All the chaos revolves around a soft, sentimental center grounded in marriage, mothers and daughters, kindness and the power of love, and pushing aggressively against the cultural bias of favoring boys over girls, men over women. (In a flashback scene to Eveyln’s birth in China, a nurse announces her arrival, knowing how deeply disappointed her father will be that his new child isn’t a male. “I’m so sorry,” he’s told.) But Evelyn busts that bias, smashes it to smithereens and drags it all over the omniverse, doing something that no one else—including men—could do, and doing it on a celestial scale.

And she learns that that every decision we make, anything we do or don’t do, creates new destiny pathways branching off from one life course and forging another. “Every rejection, every disappointment,” Evelyn is told, “has led you here.” Where you’ve been, in other words, determines where you are, repeatedly and symmetrically, like expanding rings of ripples in the expansive waters of an endless sea. Look closely and you’ll spot all the circles and round forms conspicuously sprinkled throughout the movie—mirrors, pots and pan lids, cookies, Chinese lanterns, stick-on goo-goo eyes, washing-machine windows, something on a piece of paper boldly, emphatically circled with dark ink.

And at the center of it all: a monstrously big bagel.

And like a bagel, yes, this gloriously bonkers blitzkrieg goes round and round, with a hole in the middle—a hole that Evelyn’s destined to fill. At the journey’s end, there she is, where she was at the beginning; she’s ’verse-hopped all around the cosmos, but her path brought her back around to her laundromat and left her with this blissful, all-encompassing thought.

“There is always something to love,” she says. “Even in a universe where we have hot dogs for fingers.”

Savage, cold-hearted Viking epic packs a bloody punch

The Northman
Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Nicole Kidman, Anya Taylor-Joy, Ethan Hawke, Claes Bang and Willem Dafoe
Directed by Robert Eggers
Rated R

How to Watch: In theaters Friday, April 22, 2022

The Vikings are coming! The Vikings are coming!

That phrase doesn’t mean much today, except perhaps for Minnesota NFL fans getting revved up for away games.

But some 1,200 years ago, these fearsome Scandinavian seafarers ruled the North Atlantic, raiding, pirating and plundering their way across Europe and beyond. Now they’re laying siege to multiplexes in this galloping, grotesquely immersive epic about one Viking’s merciless, bloodthirsty quest for retribution and revenge.

Swedish-born Alexander Skarsgård stars as Amleth, who sets out as a boy on his brutal life’s journey after witnessing the murder of his father, the warrior King Aurvandil (Ethan Hawke), by the king’s bastard brother, Fjölnir (Claes Bang). Narrowly escaping with his own head still attached, the little prince watches, terrified, as Fjölnir carts off his mother, queen Gudrún (Nicole Kidman), hefting her over his shoulder like a sack of stolen booty.  

“I will avenge you, Father,” young Amleth repeatedly vows, desperately rowing away in the icy waters from his pillaged coastal kingdom. “I will save you, Mother. I will kill you, Fjölnir.”

Several years later, Amleth is all grown up, a hulking Viking warrior seething with remorseless hunger for retribution—and an appetite for wanton destruction. Woe to anyone who gets in his way or even crosses his path, like the villagers he and his fellow “berserkers” attack in the intensely brutal first act of the film, slashing and bashing their way through the mud and the blood, rounding up the hardiest and healthiest to be sold into slavery and corralling everyone else—including old women and children—into a thatch hut that’s then set fire.

All in a day’s work for a Viking plunderer.

But as much as he feeds off the raw, surging testosterone of remorseless, alpha-male brutality, Amleth doesn’t forget that he’s a man on a singular mission. Given renewed resolve by an encounter with a blind seeress (the Icelandic singer Björk), he disguises himself as a slave and goes “undercover”—aided by a fellow slave, a sexy sorceress Olga (Anya-Taylor Joy)—to find his traitorous uncle.

If those themes—family honor and dishonor, revenge and a young heir seeking to restore a fallen hierarchical house—sound familiar, they should. Shakespeare based his own Hamlet on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, which itself closely follows the “hero’s journey” arc, the template of many of the world’s greatest myths, folktales and religions.

The bones of this tale may be ancient and primal, but director Robert Eggers creates a whole new world for this majestically bonkers, blood-smeared battering ram of Old World barbarism. Super-saturated with authenticity and historical nitty-gritty, The Northman is a visceral, elemental experience that makes you feel the cold, the muck and the mire, taste the brine of the salty sea—and shiver at the sights you see, watching agog as Amleth’s boundless, boiling rage plays out and spills over, like fox-head soup from a simmering caldron.

An indie auteur who certainly knows how to worm under your skin, Eggers also made the deeply unsettling The Witch (2015), which plumbed the psychological horrors of Puritanical hysteria, and The Lighthouse (2019), about two men going mad and flirting with depravity on a remote, storm-swept island. (Is that a mermaid vagina, or are you just happy to see me?) The Northman, Egger’s biggest-budget movie by far, is less complex and not near as subtle, staying more on the surface of its tempestuous tale and boldly assaulting viewers straight-on with its unflinching depictions of unbridled savagery by a man determined to follow his thread of fate and “die by the blade.” And while it’s not necessarily a pretty film, there is certainly a monumental beauty in its bold, relentless intensity, its rampaging, golly-whopping excess, and its spectacularly staged scenes.

When two semi-naked characters, both who’ve vowed to kill the other, fight and grapple amid the glowing lava of a spewing volcano, it’s a dance of death in what looks like the red-hot bowels of hell itself. You don’t see that in just any movie.  

There’s skull-cracking, disemboweling, blood-drinking and beheadings (of men and as well as horses), farting and belching, howling and yelping, and even menstrual flow has its moment. At one point, slaves are forced play a last-man-standing game with a ball and bats, like Harry Potter’s Quidditch—with a much higher fatality rate. The movie packs a lot into its runtime.  

And like Eggers’ other films, it’s suffused with some outright weirdness—hallucinogenic initiation ceremonies in which boy “pups” become “wolf” men; recurring visions of a dream-like “Tree of Kings” that depicts past, present and future royalty hanging like fruits from dark, twisted branches; Viking warriors finding their inner beast in a frenzied pre-raid battle ritual.

It’s a man’s world, for sure. But the movie’s female supporting characters—notably Kidman’s queen and Anya-Taylor Joy’s sorceress—point toward a rich subtext about the power of women in that world, one in which young Amleth’s father, the king, cautions him to “seek not the ways of women.” It’s a dismissal, yes, but also an acknowledgement, recognizing that females rule a realm that even the mightiest warrior, and even kings, respect as sacred, hallowed ground. “Your strength breaks men’s bones,” Olga tells him. “But I have the cunning to break their minds.” Valkryies, fierce female spirits, ferry fallen warriors into their afterlives in the halls of Vahalla. And when one female character tells another, “Your sword is long” after getting an eyeful of his impressive, rune-inscribed mystical blade—is that just Viking small talk, or an assertive, slyly suggestive stab of sexual, even Oedipal arousal?

Skarsgård, who first showed off his impressively sculpted physique in The Legend of Tarzan (2016), is even more pumped-up here, a hulking mass of muscle with shoulders so large they look like they were repurposed from the bulwark of a Viking longboat. Kidman’s role is juicier than you first expect, as a character who becomes much more than a damsel in distress. And the young British actress Anya-Taylor Joy—basking in the glow of success after her award-winning role in the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit and in critically hailed movies including Emma and the psych-horror-thriller One Night in Solo—worked with Eggers previously in The Witch, which made her a breakout star when she was only 18. Here, she deflates the classic stereotype of witches as withered old hags, especially when Olga slips out of her smock for a hot-springs rub-a-dub.  

And any movie in which Willem Dafoe plays a shamanistic court jester with a waggish tongue that keeps getting him into deep trouble, well, that’s just icing on the Viking cake.

Yes, the Vikings are coming. And in this wild and wooly epic in which mythology and reality comingle, collide and create more than two hours of bloody, brazen big-screen craziness and combustion, I doubt there’s a pro footballer—or even a whole team—anywhere who’d stand much of a chance in a square-off with Amleth.  

Andrew Garfield soars in director Lin-Manuel Miranda’s paean to musical theater dreams

Tick…Tick…BOOM!
Starring Andrew Garfield
Directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda
Rated PG-13

In select theaters now, available on Netflix Nov. 19

Musical-theater geeks will flip over this immersive paean to one of Broadway’s fallen heroes.

Jonathan Larson, who composed the groundbreaking rock musical Rent—which ran on Broadway for 12 years—died suddenly, of a heart malady, on the very night of his production’s premiere performance in 1996. Only 35 at the time of this cosmic irony, he was awarded three posthumous Tonys and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his La Bohemè-ish tale of impoverished young artists struggling, under the grim specter of the epidemic of AIDS, to live, love and lean on each other in the Big Apple.

But this isn’t that story. Rather, it’s the story of Larson and his pre-Rent challenges in completing, and staging, a futuristic 1990 oddity called Superbia, loosely inspired by George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984. 

Andrew Garfield plays Larson, and the film marks the directorial debut of Lin-Manuel Miranda, who certainly knows a thing about Broadway, Tonys, Grammys and other trophies as the writer (and star) of his own Broadway sensation, Hamilton. Earlier this year, another of Miranda’ works, In the Heights, got the Hollywood treatment.

Garfield may be best known to the general moviegoing public for his two movie turns as The Amazing Spider-Man, but he’s turned in several impressive other “grown-up” performances—in Martin Scorsese’s Silence, in The Social Network, as conscientious-objector WWII hero Desmond Doss in Hacksaw Ridge, and just recently, as disgraced telemarking evangelist Jim Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye.

And he soars to new heights of his own here, for a tricky role that required him to expand his skillset to learn to sing and play the piano. He portrays Larson as a zealous, youthful idealist, anxious to establish a toehold on Broadway, to create a buzz that will be his big break. The tick-ticking he hears in his head is the sound of his rapidly vanishing 20s, and his approaching self-imposed deadline: his upcoming 30^th birthday.

Larson is a bit self-obsessed and totally driven, as he nourishes his dreams while slinging sandwiches in a busy diner. But he has a big heart for his fellow “bohemian” friends, especially his childhood pal, Michael (a terrific Robin de Jesús), who gave up his own theatrical dreams for the steady income of a Madison Avenue job. And he also loves his girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Ruth Shipp, who starred in the title role in the 2014 Lifetime movie Aaliyah: The Princess of R&B), an interpretive dancer whose thoughts for a more practical future might pose a bit of a problem for their relationship.

High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens (who also starred on Broadway in Gigi and had roles in the TV musical presentations of Grease: Live and Rent: Live) and Joshua Henry—who played Aaron Burr in Hamilton—provide impressive, real-chops backupas singing characters in Larson’s show.

As he struggles with a massive, monstrous case of writer’s block, trying to find the right song to cap his musical as the days trickle down to its public-workshop debut, Larson watches his friends succumb to HIV and AIDs, putting some heavy perspective on his own deadlines and goals.  

Director Manuel can certainly identify with a young composer striving to become established, because he used to be one. He knows all about the world of Jonathan Larson, because it was once his world, too. And he certainly knows how to make a musical, deftly, innovatively unfolding Larson’s story—and his existential predicament—in a mixed format of musical performances, flashy movie-musical set pieces, straightforward dramatic scenes and “fantasy” sequences that blur the lines. When Larson goes to clear his head with a swim, he marvels as markers on the bottom seem to turn into musical staffs and notes; in the rousing number “No More,” Larson and Michael contrast the young ad executive’s gleaming new valet-tended apartment high-rise with the cramped, squalid, six-floor walkup where the two friends used to be roommates—and were Larson still lives.  

Fans of musicals will delight in Easter-egg cameos from a slate of stage-heeled celebs—a flock of cameo casting that was helped, no doubt, by Miranda’s superstar cachet in the theatrical community. Bradley Whitford is spot-on as theater icon Stephen Sondheim, who gives Larson some valuable advice, and Judith Light (who made her debut on Broadway before landing a starring role in 1977 on TV’s One Life to Live) plays Larson’s agent, Rosa, who tells him that the musical he should be working on is always “the next one.”

The next one, for Larson, was his autobiographical one-man-show, Tick…Tick…Boom!, which was ultimately staged posthumously as a multi-part rock musical. And then came Rent, the production that would have brought him the success, and the achievement, he so ardently sought as a younger man on the dreaded cusp of closing out his third decade.

But this impassioned, enthusiastically eclectic portrait reminds us of the boundless dream of a gifted creator taken too soon, and takes viewers into a teeming, bustling, hustling substrata world of musical theater that’s not quite Broadway…not just yet—as it suggest to all of us, whatever we do, that “the next one” could be, and might just be, the big one.

Benedict Cumberbatch plays a cruel cowboy in ‘The Power of the Dog’

The Power of the Dog
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Jesse Plemons, Kirsten Dunst and Kodi Smit-McPhee
Directed by Jane Campion
In theaters Friday, Nov. 19; on Netflix Wednesday, Dec. 1

The West isn’t all that wild in this taut, terrifically tense tale set in Montana in 1925; there’s electricity and automobiles. But it’s a wild ride alongside Benedict Cumberbatch—who’s played a spectrum of characters, across a wide swath of genres, from sci-fi to period dramas—as he saddles up to play a cowboy.

But not just any cowboy—he’s one particularly tough, unlikable hombre.

Cumberbatch stars as Phil Burbank, a cattle rancher who lives on the sprawling property he and his brother, George (Jesse Plemons), took over from their parents. The two siblings couldn’t be more different. George is a soft-spoken gentleman who dresses in dandy suits; Phil, who refuses to even bathe indoors, is as rough and rugged as a pair of old rawhide chaps. He castrates cattle barehanded with two brisk whisks of his knife, struts and stomps in his boots and spurs, and revels in the musk and mire of clearly being the ranch’s alpha male.

“I stink, and I like it,” he snarls, and we know it in more ways than one.

When George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst, Plemons’ real-lifewife), a widow who operates a nearly boarding house, and moves her into the mansion-like ranch manor, it triggers something in Phil—a toxic seethe of jealousy, resentment and suppressed anger. Phil cruelly taunts Rose and her sensitive son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a lanky pup of a lad who makes paper flowers, plays with a hula hoop and wears white canvas shoes instead of boots. Phil thinks Pete is a sissy, an effeminate “half-cooked” nancy, almost subhuman. And he torments the emotionally fragile Rose—and stokes her growing sense of dislocation, menace and unease—by whistling a tune that he knows she can no longer remember how to play on the piano.

Phil knows how to inflict hurt, knows how to wound. His poisonous personality burns like the bright ends of his hand-rolled cigarettes when he puffs, falling onto his shirt like combustion from a fire from deep within him. His mockery of Pete gets supportive guffaws from his ranch hands, he takes out his rage on his horse, and he drives Rose to drink and Pete to tears.

Filming in her native New Zealand, director Jane Campion, who won a pair of Oscars for writing and directing her 1993 romantic drama The Piano, creates a masterful atmosphere of creeping dread for where this is all headed. She captures the rich details of life on the ranch—and a crucial subtext of the bonding between these cowboys, whose work with other men isolates them from much of the rest of the world—against spectacular vistas of picture-postcard perfection, with massive mountains, oceans of grass, and a herd of hundreds of cattle, flowing across the dusty plain like a bovine river.

High up on a mountainside, Phil sees something, when the sun is at a certain angle, casting shadows on the terrain, making a specific outline, a design in the interplay of light and dark. But he’s also looking up there and into his past, and the genesis of his idolization and fetishization of a long-gone horseman, Bronco Henry, who taught him how to work cattle.

Cumberbatch, who was Oscar-nominated for his starring role in The Imitation Game (2014), shows all the signs of another nomination here, creating a character that practically sears the screen with his vicious unkindness—and a complexity that hints at fragility, a degree of refinement, intelligence, and some other things…despite his grimy fingernails, coarse personality and stiff backbone. With a towering performance that recalls the intensity of Daniel-Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood and Phantom Thread, Cumberbatch’s Phil is a portrait of bullying, hyper-masculine toxicity that makes a target of anything, and anyone, that he perceives to be weak.

After Pete makes a discovery that sheds new light on Phil, it begins to reshape their relationship—but it will it lead to something better, or something even more malevolent?

The movie (and the 1967 novel on which it’s based) takes its title from a Bible verse in the book of Psalms, a bitter poem attributed David, the young shepherd who slew the giant Goliath and later became King of Israel. It’s reference to deliverance from his foes and “the power of the dog,” an animal seen in ancient times as a lowly, undomesticated pack scavenger that attacked the vulnerable.

Phil has both the bark and the bite. He’s top dog among his group of ranch-hand cowboys in this twisty, tough-as-nails frontier tale, in which the age-old battle between good and evil plays out on an intense psychological tableau, one straddling the border between clean, convenient modernity and the rugged, raw, ragged past.

And when it bares its teeth and clamps down, hard, and likely not how you’d expect, this Dog takes you by surprise, and it really leaves a mark.