The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

This is an exquisitely crafted film, its unhurried rhythms continually shifting as plangent notes of melancholy, solitude, torment, jealousy and resentment surface. Campion is in full control of her material, digging deep into the turbulent inner life of each of her characters with unerring subtlety.

The Telegraph by Robbie Collin

The film is often hard to watch, but Campion and her uniformly excellent cast leaven the discomfort with a constant sense of prickling intrigue around what precisely we are watching play out here, and how far the ritual will go.

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

The Power of the Dog sticks its teeth into you so fast and furtively that you may not feel the sting on your skin until after the credits roll, but the delayed bite of the film’s ending doesn’t stop it from leaving behind a well-earned scar.

BBC by Nicholas Barber

It's a film which shimmers with intelligence, and if the plot isn't clear until the very last scene, well, it's worth the wait. When that scene arrives, the purpose of every previous scene snaps into sharp focus, leaving you with the urge to go back to the beginning and watch the whole thing again.

Time by Stephanie Zacharek

This is a movie as big as the open sky, but one where human emotions are still distinctly visible, as fine and sharp as a blade of grass.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Kate Taylor

There is exquisite dramatic tension here, built partly by Campion’s deft storytelling and partly by her powerful cast.

Polygon by Robert Daniels

The Power of the Dog doesn’t just mark Campion’s return — it’s the best movie of 2021 so far. This psychological Western’s themes of isolation and toxic masculinity are an ever-tightening lasso of seemingly innocuous events, and they import more horror and meaning on every closer inspection, corralling viewers under an unforgettable spell.

LarsenOnFilm by Josh Larsen

Cumberbatch makes every moment he’s onscreen mesmerizing—entertaining and terrifying at the same time.

Original-Cin by Linda Barnard

With The Power of the Dog, Campion has crafted a contemporary Western masterpiece that turns on the same pacing and style of 50-year-old films. She takes her time, letting the story, based on the 1967 novel by Thomas Savage, reveal itself in languid style.

Los Angeles Times by Justin Chang

Campion handles the story with puzzle-box precision, but the power of this movie goes beyond its clockwork plotting and startling, deeply satisfying denouement.

The Playlist by Tomris Laffly

It’s cinematic poetry, if there ever was one, bourgeoning in meaning the more you linger in its shadow.

TheWrap by Carlos Aguilar

For a movie that appears to stop and start as it shifts its focus a few times too many, denying us longer introspection into its most magnetic man-to-man rapport, The Power of the Dog thrives on having actors so submerged in the fiction that they are creating a reality. Their subcutaneous labor translates what’s unsaid into fleeting but telling gestures.

The Film Stage by David Katz

The Power of the Dog has attributes that recall her past work but pleasingly seems––if not a new direction––that Campion is drawing upon a fresh skillset to best do this tale justice.

Vanity Fair by Richard Lawson

While the core narrative is plenty compelling in all its creeping dread and curiosity, The Power of the Dog is not too concerned with being about any one thing. The film’s secrets are revealed while new ones bloom into being. Life tumbles after life in the ecosystem of all of us, seething amid the dust clouds we can’t help but kick up.

Screen Daily by Jonathan Romney

If The Power Of The Dog isn’t the absolute killer coup that Campionites might have hoped, this is her most thoroughly conceived, consistently involving drama for years: taken all in all, pretty much the full visual, dramatic and, indeed sonic package.

The Guardian by Xan Brooks

It’s a brawny, brooding drama about the wreckage caused by men, beautifully framed in muted neutral tones as the camera circles the ranch-house with a deliberate, stealthy tread.

Variety by Owen Gleiberman

All of this should build, slowly and inexorably, in force and emotion. But for a film that’s actually, at heart, rather tidy and old-fashioned in its triangular gamesmanship, “The Power of the Dog” needed to get to a more bruising catharsis. In its crucial last act, the film becomes too oblique.