10 Recent Movie Scenes Everyone Misunderstood

Jane Campion's masterful western drama The Power of the Dog is absolutely a film that rewards audiences who pay attention, right up to an ending that seems to heavily imply that caustic rancher Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) was secretly killed by his sister-in-law Rose's (Kirsten Dunst) son Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee).

Phil swiftly succumbs to illness at film's end, and though the doctor believes he died of anthrax, his brother George (Jesse Plemons) is left shocked given Phil's meticulousness with avoiding handling diseased cattle.

Yet earlier in the film Peter gave Phil an animal hide with which to create a lasso without informing him that it came from a dead animal, and in the final scene we see Peter handling the same lasso with a pair of gloves.

Furthermore, in the final scene Peter smiles at his newly sober mother as she happily embraces George, seemingly relieved that the disruptive force that is Phil is now out of their lives.

Though this ending seems relatively self-evident on paper, a quick Google search of the film reveals many viewers unsure about the precise meaning of its ending, and whether Peter did indeed kill Phil.

While it'd be easy to dismiss this purely as people not putting their damn phones away while watching a Netflix Original movie at home, Campion's film does move in a subtler rhythm than more casual viewers may be expecting from a Benedict Cumberbatch western.

But to clarify, Peter absolutely killed Phil, and the original ending even hammered this point home by lingering on the definition of anthrax in Peter's medical textbook.