Released: 03/06/22
The phenomenal director Jane Campion finally won her Oscar with the awesome The Power of the Dog, part of a genre I’ve decided to call ‘Creep Western’. (No spoilers, but yikes, what an ending.) Sadly, Jonny Greenwood wuz robbed in the Best Soundtrack category, beaten by a German accountant called Hans Zimmer; but for my money this is as good as There Will Be Blood, which is high praise indeed. While that score was inspired in part by the ferocious atonal glissandi of Xenakis and Penderecki, the knotty and intimate compositions here, perhaps best described as the inverse to Aaron Copland’s paeans to the American West, help to dial up the tension that pervades Campion’s film to an almost unbearable degree.