Yet Peter does so as an expression of chivalry: “What kind of man would I be,” he asks, “if I did not help my mother?” Peter’s lisp and slender build make other guys call him “Nancy” and “bitch,” and he uses anthrax on behalf of a woman, his mom (Rose, played by Kirsten Dunst), whom Phil has been mocking and manipulating. In the film’s twist ending, the medical student Peter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) fatally infects the cow herder Phil (Benedict Cumberbatch). Poisoning both is and isn’t a woman’s weapon in Jane Campion’s Western drama, The Power of the Dog. Yet works of entertainment such as Arsenic and Old Lace, Phantom Thread, and Game of Thrones have continuously circled the same logic: When physical prowess and social status confer strength, women fight carefully, in secret, and by exploiting their roles as helpers to men. The majority of real-life murders by poisoning are, as most acts of violence, committed by men. “Poison is a woman’s weapon,” Sherlock Holmes says in the 1945 movie Pursuit to Algiers, articulating one of popular culture’s favorite seductive fictions. This article contains spoilers for The Power of the Dog.
