The story centers on the Burbank brothers, Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons), who together run a successful ranching outfit. What looks like it might become a love story turns out to be a tale of revenge. But amid all of the film’s romantic beauty darkness and violence lurk, including in unexpected places. In “The Power of the Dog,” two lonely men also make a connection of sorts.

The film shares a certain visual vocabulary with “Brokeback Mountain,” Ang Lee’s 2005 adaptation of Annie Proulx’s brilliant short story about two cowboys, Jack and Ennis, who fall in love in nineteen-sixties Wyoming. Sequences of men at play and at work, light striking their bare flesh, muscles rippling as they pull ropes and goad their horses, possess the same languid sexual frankness of a Manet or a Degas. Shots of cattle flowing across the hills and into the Great Plains have the energy of one of Eugène Boudin’s beach scenes. Campion is known for making intensely beautiful images of the natural world, but in the new film (shot in her native New Zealand) her painterly impulses are especially breathtaking. Jane Campion’s new film “The Power of the Dog,” based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel of the same name, is set on a ranch in Montana in the nineteen-twenties.

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