The Power of The Dog
Jane Campion
Thriller • 2021 • 2h 6m
Synopsis
Czechoslovakia, 1980. In a Ruthenian village in the east of the country, Mara, a fifteen-year-old girl whose mother has died, dreams of becoming a pilot and leaving behind a life shaped by agricultural labour and domestic responsibilities. Her father, Alexander, a widower deeply attached to the land, insists that she stay at home and carry on its traditions. When the girl attempts to enrol in an aviation academy without his consent, the conflict between them intensifies. Their lives are further upended by a decision taken by the authorities: the village is to be evacuated and demolished to make way for a reservoir. While Alexander stubbornly clings to his home, Mara sees the disappearance of the world that confines her as an opportunity for emancipation. But destruction imposed from outside does not necessarily coincide with the freedom one desires.
Review
6 min read
Reviewed by Beatrice
· 26. October 2026
“Rootedness is perhaps the most important and least recognised need of the human soul.”
Simone Weil
What makes us prisoners of a place: our attachment to our roots or the impossibility of severing them? This is the question the film raises, alongside another: what does it mean to be free when even the world we wish to escape is taken away from us without our being given a choice?
In Flood (Potopa), Martin Gonda explores these questions through a family conflict that History transforms into something more radical: the erasure of an entire community.
Set in communist Czechoslovakia in 1980, the film intertwines Mara’s desire for emancipation with her father Alexander’s resistance to the demolition of the village destined to be submerged by the Starina reservoir. Two forms of attachment to the world collide: that of someone who wants to preserve it because he recognises his own identity in it, and that of someone who wants to leave it because she can find no room there for her future. Alexander sees the land as an inheritance to be safeguarded and a continuity to be maintained; Mara experiences it as the boundaries of an existence already decided by others. Her father expects her to reproduce his destiny, while she wants to escape a model she never chose.
Gonda constructs this conflict without reducing it to a schematic opposition between tradition and modernity. Alexander is authoritarian and unable fully to recognise his daughter’s autonomy, but his stubbornness is not without reason: losing his home means losing the network of relationships, memories and attachments through which his life has acquired meaning. Mara, an outstanding student, is not simply a young rebel in search of freedom. Her desire to escape stems from the awareness that, in this world, her future has been assigned to her before she has even had the chance to imagine it. When she declares that she is glad the village is going to be flooded, she expresses an anger that is also an extreme form of powerlessness.
This is where the film finds its most compelling insight. The destruction of the village seems to offer Mara a solution to the conflict: if the world that holds her back disappears, she will finally be able to leave as well. But collective catastrophe does not amount to individual emancipation. Imposed from above in the name of progress, the authorities’ decision deprives the villagers of precisely what Mara longs to gain: the ability to determine their own destiny. The state neither liberates the girl nor saves her father. It decides for both of them, erasing the place in which their lives, however conflict-ridden, have taken shape.
The film expands on this reflection through concrete details that prevent its historical dimension from becoming a mere backdrop. The priest who continues to repair the church destined for demolition, the abandoned houses and the exhumed graves all speak of a loss that goes beyond property or shelter. The bond between a community and its past is severed, as is the connection between the living and the dead, between identity and the places that made it possible. Continuing to repair something that is about to be destroyed may seem futile; yet it is precisely in the apparent futility of this work that a refusal emerges to regard a life still in progress as already over.
The relationship between Mara and Alexander also changes when a stroke suddenly leaves the father vulnerable. The girl, who wants to free herself from her family responsibilities, finds herself having to care for him. The conflict does not disappear, but it loses some of its rigidity: the man who insisted on deciding his daughter’s future is no longer invulnerable, while she discovers that freeing herself from his authority does not necessarily mean ceasing to feel attached to him. Their reconciliation does not erase the reasons for their clash, nor does it restore the world they are losing. It merely makes a different relationship possible, at a time when separation has become inevitable.
Gonda’s direction follows this story with a restrained, naturalistic approach, attentive to the materiality of the settings and to everyday gestures. The rural landscape is not idealised as a lost paradise, nor is modernisation portrayed as a promise of salvation. The unhurried pace and some narrative passages that are not always explored in equal depth do not undermine the strength of the film’s structure, which finds its emotional centre in the relationship between father and daughter and its necessary political dimension in the disappearance of the village.
In The Fifth Season, it is the natural order that begins to unravel; in Flood, it is political power that decrees the end of a world. This very difference opens up a reflection on two forms of powerlessness: the helplessness we experience in the face of what we cannot control, and the one produced by those who exercise the power to decide on our behalf.
Ultimately, the question Flood leaves open is not whether it is better to stay or to leave. It is the difference between abandoning a world by choice and having it taken away from us, between severing our own roots and discovering that someone else can tear them out for us. Freedom does not mean being forced to preserve what we have inherited, but neither does it mean watching everything erased by an external force. It lies in the ability to decide what to leave behind, what to carry with us and what to transform.
Mara wants to free herself from her world; Alexander cannot imagine one without it. History deprives them both of the possibility of choosing, without making their situations equivalent. Their reconciliation does not resolve the contradiction: it merely makes it possible to live with it. And the flood in the title ultimately comes to signify this as well: the moment when a world disappears, leaving no way to determine whether what remains is liberation or loss. For we may long for the end of what oppresses us without wanting to lose the right to decide when and how to leave it.
“There is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”
Walter Benjamin
