Kodi Smit-McPhee walks us through that 'Power of the Dog' ending
LOS ANGELES — Five minutes into "The Power of the Dog," we meet Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a frail-looking young man sitting alone in his room, painstakingly crafting paper flowers that will be placed as table centerpieces in the restaurant inn that his mother, Rose (Kirsten Dunst), owns.
Later that evening, those flowers will turn to ash, burned by the bullying cattle rancher Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch), the first in a series of threatening acts directed toward Peter and his mother, menace that gives Jane Campion's chamber piece Western a mounting, almost unbearable tension — which Smit-McPhee felt acutely when first reading the script.
"I felt sorry for Peter the whole time," Smit-McPhee, 25, says during a
