Cumberbatch has, over the last decade, too often played similar incarnations of a likeable neurotic – Holmes, Strange, Turing – but the diminishing returns are here reversed with a personality who, though troubled enough to deserve a syndrome in his own name, emerges as fully fleshed as a character from George Eliot. The film's title is from the Bible and their ruinous rivalry is worthy of an Old Testament melodrama. If the drama has a flaw it is that those two compelling characters complete their journeys relatively early and leave the remainder to Phil and Peter. Jonny Greenwood delivers an anxious, often pizzicato score that inevitably points up wider reminders of There Will be Blood

Photograph: Kirsty Griffin/Courtesy of Netflix Kirsten Dunst as Rose in The Power of the Dog. Only comfortable out on the plains where no man or woman can inhibit his venomous ego, Phil patronises George, bullies Peter and aggravates Rose’s developing alcoholism.

When she and her deceptively fragile son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee) move on to the ranch, a psycho-drama kicks off that will leave all four players rubbed raw. The tense equilibrium is such that, despite inhabiting something like a mansion, the two men share a bedroom reasonably comfortably until George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), the widowed keeper of a nearby saloon. If he lives long enough he will enjoy dozing off in front of I Love Lucy. George Burbank (Jesse Plemons), his gentle, less colourful sibling, dresses in sensible suits and speaks in the language of a mid-century businessman.

'I stink, and I like it,' he barks after a day's work. Despite an apparently expansive education, the bitter, sexually-repressed Phil Burbank (Benedict Cumberbatch), whose every word is salt on sensitive skin, revels in the toil and filth of a cattleman's lifestyle.

Set in rural Montana during the mid 1920s, this adaptation of an underappreciated Thomas Savage novel hangs around the clash between two different brothers. Jane Campion's latest film is not really a western, but if it were it would be one of those that – among other business – marks the final shift from residual frontier to something like civilisation.

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