WHAT’S a “western?” Cinemagoers and film critics have been asking that age-old question and aiming to answer it, too, especially ever since The Power of the Dog arrived on Netflix at the end of 2021.

Jane Campion’s movie, which was filmed in her native New Zealand, has the look and feel of a Hollywood western. It has bronco-busting cowboys and a few Indians, albeit not of the hoop-and-holler kind, and it doesn’t spew the myths of the frontier.

Set in Montana in 1925, the year that US readers fell in love with F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, it boasts wide open space and spectacular landscapes, though Campion’s landscapes also have something mysterious and spiritual about them.