Jane Campion’s BAFTA-winning western The Power of the Dog is distinguished by both great acting and a surprising ending, which I won’t reveal.
The strength of the picture’s denouement is that it doesn’t come across as an M. Night Shyamalan-style contrivance, rather as a logical development of the characters.
Of course, twist endings are nothing new; witness the likes of Psycho (1960), The Planet of the Apes (1968), Soylent Green (1972 – Heston again), The Wicker Man (1973), The Parallax View (1974) and more recently Se7en (1995).
The Power of the Dog is a relative rarity in being a cowboy movie with an unexpected conclusion; the device is usually employed in sci-fi, horror and thrillers.
Shock endings are a risky endeavour – a fair few are telegraphed in advance to the even half-aware viewer, often greeted with a shrug of ‘well, I saw that coming’.
Case in point, the final scenes of Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes remake (2001), Steven (Peaky Blinders) Knight’s Serenity (2019) and Signs, where the hyper-intelligent alien invaders are defeated by a few beakers of plain old H20.
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