Feel free to pick and choose — you don’t need to run every question in one sitting unless your book club is prepared to sit with the discomfort for a while, which is, frankly, the only way to do this story justice.

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CHARACTERS: WHO IS PHIL BURBANK, AND DOES EITHER VERSION LET YOU KNOW?
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  1. Casting Call from the Montana Ranch
    When Benedict Cumberbatch appeared as Phil Burbank — coiled, brilliant, casually cruel, and carrying something tightly controlled beneath every gesture — did your mental image of Savage’s Phil say yes, exactly, or did it hedge? Same question for Kirsten Dunst as Rose, Jesse Plemons as George, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as Peter. Who felt most like the character Savage built across the novel’s careful pages, and who felt like a screen creation that shifted your understanding of what the novel had described?
  2. Phil Burbank: The Bully With the Interior the Novel Keeps Opening Up
    Savage’s Phil is one of fiction’s great psychological puzzles — a Harvard-educated rancher performing brutal masculinity while concealing a rich interior life: the love of Bronco Henry, the banjo, the paper flowers, the desire he cannot name. The novel gives you Phil’s interiority in careful, controlled doses. Cumberbatch gives you Phil’s surface and what leaks through it. Which version made you understand Phil more? And which made you feel the specific texture of his self-hatred — the way a man can punish others for the thing he cannot allow in himself?
  3. Rose: The Woman Being Destroyed in Plain Sight
    Savage’s Rose is a portrait of a woman being psychologically dismantled by a man who understands exactly which pressure points to apply. Kirsten Dunst plays her with a quality of increasing dissolution — the drinking accelerating, the social self shrinking, the person disappearing. Did the film give Rose enough interiority to be a full person rather than a victim? And which version made you feel more clearly the specific mechanism of Phil’s cruelty toward her — that it is targeted, deliberate, and designed to achieve a particular outcome?
  4. George Burbank: The Good Man Who Cannot See What Is Happening
    George is the novel’s great bystander — a genuinely decent man who loves Rose and cannot or will not see what Phil is doing to her. Jesse Plemons plays him with an opaque gentleness. Did either version make George’s blindness feel like cowardice, limitation, or simply a different kind of damage — a man who has spent his whole life not seeing Phil clearly? And did you feel angrier at Phil for his cruelty or at George for his willful not-noticing?
  5. Peter: The Boy Neither Version Fully Reveals Until the End
    Peter Gordon is the novel’s most controlled revelation — a young man who appears fragile, effeminate, and easily dismissed, and who turns out to be the most dangerous person in the story. Kodi Smit-McPhee plays him with a stillness that critics called either remarkable or monotonous depending on their patience. Did the film’s Peter feel like the right withholding of information — a performance calibrated to the novel’s gradual reveal — or like a character the film never fully committed to? And when the reveal came, did it feel earned in each version?
  6. Bronco Henry: The Ghost Who Shapes Everything
    Bronco Henry never appears in either version — he is dead before the story begins, present only in Phil’s obsessive memory and the objects he keeps. Yet he determines Phil’s entire interior life. Did the novel or the film make Bronco Henry’s absence feel more like a presence? And did either version make you fully understand what Phil felt for Bronco Henry — not just that he loved him, but the specific, suffocating quality of a love that has no outlet and no resolution?

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CAMPION’S ADAPTATION: FAITHFUL IN INCIDENT, TRANSFORMED IN MEANING
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  1. The Same Story, Read Entirely Differently
    Critics have noted that Campion’s film is formally faithful to Savage’s novel — the events, the characters, the setting, the ending are all there. And yet the film feels like a fundamentally different interpretation of the same material, because Campion foregrounds Phil’s sexuality, his self-hatred, and his relationship with Peter in ways that give the ending a different moral weight than Savage’s more ambiguous original. Did the film feel faithful to the novel’s spirit, or like a compelling argument about what the novel is really about — an argument Savage himself may or may not have intended?
  2. Montana Filmed in New Zealand: The Landscape Remade
    Campion shot the film in New Zealand’s South Island, using its tawny, spare landscape to stand in for 1920s Montana. Critics praised the cinematography (Ari Wegner’s work won considerable acclaim) and noted it gave the Western landscape an unfamiliar, slightly dreamlike quality. Did the New Zealand landscape feel like Montana to you, or did its subtle wrongness add something to the film’s atmosphere of psychological displacement? And does shooting a Western in New Zealand say something about what Campion was doing with the genre — making it slightly strange, slightly off, refusing to deliver the conventional comfort of the American West?
  3. The Female Gaze on a Western: What Changes
    Campion has said she was drawn to Savage’s novel partly because it gave her a way into a world — masculine, violent, performatively Western — that she could approach from outside with genuine curiosity. Critics credited the film with bringing a specifically female gaze to material that would typically be male territory. Did the film feel different from conventional Westerns in ways you could attribute to Campion’s perspective? And did the novel, written by a man who knew this world from inside, feel different in ways that Campion’s outsider eye couldn’t replicate?
  4. The Score: Jonny Greenwood’s Strings and Phil’s Banjo
    Jonny Greenwood’s score is one of the film’s most discussed elements—unsettling, beautiful, and doing psychological work the images sometimes deliberately withhold. The novel has no score, obviously, but it has a specific quality of prose tension that operates in a similar register. Did the film’s music add to your experience of the story, or did it occasionally tip into telling you what to feel at moments when the film should have trusted you more? And is there a specific musical moment — the banjo, the strings, a silence where music should have been — that stuck with you?
  5. The Ending: Ambiguous in the Novel, Clarified by the Film?
    Savage’s novel ends with Phil’s death from anthrax and leaves a degree of ambiguity about Peter’s role in it — the reader has the information to understand what happened, but the novel doesn’t underline it. Campion’s film makes the mechanics clearer and, in its final sequence, gives Peter a moment of quiet self-examination that the novel handles differently. Did the film’s more explicit ending feel like a clarification of what the novel always meant, or like Campion resolving an ambiguity that Savage kept deliberately open? And does knowing Peter did it — understanding exactly how and why — change what the story means morally?

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TONE & VIBE: PSYCHOLOGICAL WESTERN, OR WESTERN THAT HAPPENS TO BE PSYCHOLOGICAL?
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  1. The Slow Burn and Its Demands
    Both the novel and the film operate at a deliberate, unhurried pace — building dread through accumulation rather than incident, asking for patience from a reader or viewer who may not initially understand what they are in. The film was praised for its patience and criticized, by some, for its slowness. Did either version make you feel the slow build as purposeful — tension accumulating beneath a surface that refuses to break until it has to? Or were there moments where the patience tipped into withholding for its own sake?
  2. The Western as Genre and the Western as Cage
    Savage’s novel and Campion’s film both use the Western’s conventions as a kind of trap—the codes of masculine performance, the landscape’s indifference, the ranch as a world with its own rules —all of it creating a cage for Phil that he cannot acknowledge or escape. Did either version make you feel the Western genre as a specific system of constraint rather than a setting? And is there a version of Phil’s story that couldn’t be told in the Western mode — that needs the specific codes of that world to make his self-destruction legible?
  3. Cruelty as Intelligence: Phil’s Particular Gifts
    Phil Burbank is highly intelligent and uses that intelligence as a weapon. The cruelty he deploys against Rose and, initially, against Peter is not random or impulsive; it is precise, calibrated, and relentless. Did the novel or the film make you feel the specific horror of cruelty that knows exactly where to cut? And is there a risk that in both versions — the novel’s interiority, the film’s Cumberbatch — Phil is made too fascinating, too compelling, in a way that inadvertently romanticizes what he does?
  4. Repression as Period Detail and Universal Condition
    The story is set in 1925, and Phil’s situation — the homosexuality he cannot express, the tenderness he has weaponized into cruelty — is specific to a historical moment when that repression was not a choice but a condition of survival. Did either version make you feel the period specificity of Phil’s damage, or did it feel like a more universal portrait of what repression does to a person? And does locating Phil’s psychology in a specific historical moment make it more sympathetic or simply more explicable?

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PAGE VS. SCREEN: WHO GOT CLOSER TO PHIL?
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  1. Interior Access vs. Surface Revelation
    Savage’s novel gives you Phil’s interior — not fully, not generously, but with careful, controlled glimpses that accumulate into something devastating. Cumberbatch gives you Phil’s exterior and what it fails to conceal. Did the novel’s interior access make Phil more understandable, or simply more exposed? Did the film’s surface make him more frightening, or more opaque? And which version gave you the Phil that felt truest — the one you understood, or the one you couldn’t quite read?
  2. Scenes the Film Staged Better Than the Novel Described
    Name one moment where Campion’s camera gave you something Savage’s prose couldn’t: the landscape at a specific hour, a look between Phil and Peter that carries the full weight of the story’s subtext, a physical detail — the rawhide, the hide strips, the hides Peter brings Phil — that the film made viscerally real. Which visual moment felt like the ideal rendering of what this story most needed?
  3. What the Novel Did That the Film Couldn’t
    Savage’s prose has a quality of extreme control — a narrative voice that sees everything and judges almost nothing, letting the reader do the moral work. Were there passages — Phil’s memories of Bronco Henry, Rose’s interiority during her dissolution, Peter’s thought processes as he identifies what he will do — that no performance could replicate? Name one thing the novel gave you that the screen was structurally unable to deliver.
  4. Peter’s Plan: Revealed Earlier in the Novel, Withheld Longer in the Film
    The novel gives the reader access to Peter’s understanding and intentions somewhat earlier than the film does—the gap between what Peter knows and what Phil suspects is calibrated differently in each version. Did you figure out Peter’s plan before the ending in either version? And does knowing it earlier — or later — change what you watch or read in the middle of the story? Is ignorance or knowledge the more uncomfortable position in this particular story?

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THEMES: MASCULINITY, POWER, AND THE DOG THAT ISN’T DELIVERED
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  1. The Title: What Power, Whose Dog?
    The title comes from Psalm 22: “Deliver my soul from the sword; my darling from the power of the dog.” Both versions carry this title without explaining it. The dog is Phil — or perhaps the power is Phil’s repression, or perhaps the darling is Rose, or Peter, or both. Did either version make you feel the title’s meaning clicking into place at a specific moment? And does the biblical source give the story a moral frame that either version uses or refuses?
  2. Toxic Masculinity Before the Phrase Existed
    Phil’s performance of brutal, contemptuous masculinity is a specific version of a specific historical pathology — a man who has internalized the codes of the frontier West so completely that any softness, including his own, becomes intolerable. Did either version make you feel the cultural construction of that masculinity — the way it is learned and enforced, not simply possessed? And is there a risk that calling Phil’s psychology “toxic masculinity” flattens something that both Savage and Campion are rendering with considerably more complexity?
  3. The Predator and the Prey: Who Is Actually Dangerous?
    The story initially presents Phil as the predator and Peter as the prey, then reveals that the power dynamic is more complicated than it seems. Peter is not a victim; he is an agent with a plan. Did either version manage the slow reversal of that power dynamic effectively? And what do you make of Peter’s final moment of self-examination — the question the film gives him that the novel handles differently? Is Peter a hero, a killer, or something for which neither word is adequate?
  4. Rose’s Drinking: Symptom or Character?
    Rose’s alcoholism accelerates under Phil’s systematic psychological assault. Both versions show this, but the novel gives it more interiority while the film shows it more explicitly as a physical deterioration. Did either version make you feel Rose’s drinking as a character trait she is responsible for, a symptom of what Phil is doing to her, or both simultaneously? And does the question of responsibility matter morally in a situation where someone is being deliberately broken?

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OVERALL ADAPTATION VERDICT: HOW MUCH POWER DOES THE DOG HAVE?
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  1. Jane Campion’s Reading: Author of the Film or Interpreter of the Novel?
    Campion has spoken extensively about what she thinks the novel is about and what she wanted to do with it — specifically, her interest in Phil’s repressed homosexuality as the engine of everything. Thomas Savage was himself a gay man who kept his sexuality private during his lifetime. Did Campion’s reading feel like the definitive interpretation of the novel, or like a brilliant filmmaker’s argument about a text that can sustain other readings too? And is there a version of this story — a different interpretation of the same material — that would also be valid?
  2. What Each Version Does Best
    One gold star for the novel, one for the film. They don’t have to be for the same thing. (Suggested categories: Best Controlled Revelation of a Character Who Has Been Hiding in Plain Sight; Best Landscape Photography in the Service of Psychological Dread; Best Performance of Cruelty That Is Also a Form of Self-Destruction; Best Use of a Title Nobody Explains; Best Ending That Makes You Reconsider Every Scene That Came Before It.)
  3. Recommend: Read, Watch, or Both?
    If a friend had time for only one version — novel or film — which would you send them to first, and why? Would your answer change if they have a low tolerance for slow-burn psychological tension? If they’re interested in Campion as a filmmaker more than in Savage as a novelist? If they want the more morally ambiguous experience, rather than the one that more clearly resolves the story’s questions? And is there a case that reading the novel after the film is actually the richer experience — that Campion gives you a reading of Phil that makes the novel’s controlled interiority more devastating in retrospect?
  4. Order of Operations
    Novel then film, film then novel, or just one and done? Does reading the novel first mean you watch the film tracking Campion’s interpretive choices — where she amplifies, where she clarifies, where she resolves what Savage left open? Does watching the film first give you Cumberbatch’s Phil as the frame through which you read a novel whose own Phil is more tightly withheld? And is there an argument that the novel and the film are doing different things with the same material — the novel keeping its secrets longer, the film making its argument more explicitly — such that experiencing both gives you something qualitatively different from either alone?
  5. Final Club Gut Check
    On the dial from “perfect page-to-screen translation” to “loosely inspired by a feeling of repressed Western dread filmed in New Zealand with a Radiohead guitarist,” where does Campion’s The Power of the Dog land? And the question the story keeps returning to: is Phil Burbank a monster who deserves what happens to him, a damaged man who deserved a different world, or someone for whom neither judgment is adequate? Did either version give you a definitive answer — or did both leave you exactly where the psalm does, asking to be delivered from a power that isn’t going anywhere?

Use, tweak, or mash these questions as needed — your club, your reckoning.