1 week ago
10
The most uncomfortable scene in “Rosebush Pruning” doesn’t involve violence or sexual perversity, although these elements are regularly entangled throughout. No, it’s when Jack (Jamie Bell) brings his new girlfriend to meet his family for lunch. These things are often awkward at the best of times and with the best of families, but this oddball mess of a household might just be the actual worst.
Awkward giggles and ruthless stares punctuate silence until the blind matriarch (played by Tracy Letts) asks his daughter to describe Martha’s (Elle Fanning) appearance to him in exhaustive detail. The obvious price gap between her Zara dress and the Bottega handbag gifted to her by Jack is cruelly teased out in what would usually be the turning point of a scene like this.
But then The Father takes it even further, calmly asking his daughter Anna (Riley Keough) to describe Martha’s breasts. What’s stranger than this request even is how it’s demanded without shame (or how Anna uses this to score points in her bid to win Jack over for herself).
In turn, it would be easy to describe how the film looks with just as much appreciation for the physical aspects of it too. And yes, there’s a temptation to be just as lurid as the father in doing so, because what director Karim Aïnouz achieves here visually is unreal in every sense of the word.
Shot with devotion by DP Hélène Louvart, frame after frame looks like it’s been ripped from the pages of a fashion magazine that someone like Anna might occupy herself with, eternally bored by the rich comforts that their prison-like home provides. Except there’s nothing boring about the pops and splashes of color, all blood-rich reds and luminous yellows that defy the murky greys that have come to define Hollywood in recent years. Think early Pedro Almodóvar, with a far meaner streak.
The cast too are just as gorgeous to look at. From Callum Turner‘s cheekbones and Fanning’s wide eyes to Keough’s legs and Lukas Gage’s curls, beauty strikes at every turn, yet barely conceals the barbs and thorns such looks envelop here. It’s almost unnatural how good everything looks, and deliberately so.
The opening title card, a bold contrast of that same blood-rich red and luminous yellow lingers a little longer than you might find comfortable, signaling a shift into another world that’s stranger and more heightened than our own. The cast lean into this fully, often stilted with dialogue just one step out of a natural rhythm. These people are nothing like us, warped through money and transgression until they’re barely recognizable as human at all.
That language is weaponized so maliciously throughout Aïnouz’s second English-language feature speaks to his intent to unnerve the audience relentlessly. Even the film’s title is lifted from a turn of phrase that Turner’s younger son Ed has made up to catch people out, to feel superior and revel in their lack of understanding. Yet the bizarre behavior that accompanies each interaction is recognizable in that it bears the clear fingerprint of co-scriptwriter Efthimis Filippou.
What story there is in “Rosebush Pruning” — loosely based on Marco Bellocchio’s “Fists in the Pocket” (1965) — is characterized by a similar cadence to the one Filippou developed alongside Greek “Weird Wave” pioneer Yorgos Lanthimos in “Dogtooth” and “The Lobster.”
The fairytale-like setup further removes the film from reality. Because where else but here would a mother (played by a game Pamela Anderson) die at the hands of wild wolves, ripped apart in a forest near the family’s opulent Catalonian home? Early on, we’re introduced to their monthly visit to the site of her death where they leave behind a sacrificial lamb to honour The Mother’s memory and ensure the wolves are well fed so no one else will die at their hands. It’s not about helping people though, and it’s not about Anderson’s matriarch for that matter either. This is just one in a series of rituals designed to liven up the tedium of wealth, just another game in service of manipulating others while pushing back against an all-encompassing numbness.
The perverse vignettes come in quick succession, yet all we know for the vast majority of the film is that Jack wants out while his family all want to make out with him. It’s not until toward the end that Ed begins “pruning” his rivals for Jack’s attention. Even before that though, everything is pushed to increasingly shocking extremes. The twists verge on too cruel, the siblings too close, and for some people watching, the story will just be too much.
This maximalist family saga isn’t so much a rallying cry to eat the rich as it is to consume them as their desires devour each other. There are moments where this sweaty mix of comic with the dramatic threatens to almost say something of substance, but then Gage’s Robert will sniff his brother’s cum-stained towel or we’ll finally get to see why The Father loves brushing his teeth so much and it all slips back into farce.
That’s not to say the grotesquery of it all isn’t entertaining, especially in the hands of this all-star cast. Keough alone could carry the film, embodying the most peculiar mix of lust and off-kilter desire in her baby-blue thigh high boots. Yet these shades of John Waters-like humur are often lost in the film’s search for its own protagonist.
Jack is the most fleshed out of the siblings, leading his own separate arc opposite a typically great Elle Fanning, and it’s in this narrative where the film actually threatens to say something substantial about privilege (given how Martha’s wealth still pales in comparison). But that’s why it’s so odd when the film regularly switches Jack out for Ed’s viewpoint instead. Turner plays the middle brother with intriguing melancholy and an almost alien detachment, which works within the world this film creates, but not necessarily for a main character.
To center Jack instead, however, might have detracted too much from his role as an object of warped desire within the house. Either way, the result is still opaque in its messaging.
Wearying and amusing in equal measure, “Rosebush Pruning” is a visceral, often entertaining social satire without purpose. There’s little direction to speak of beyond pushing us ever closer to the edge. You could argue there’s certainly a demand for this, a need, even, to dismantle privilege in the end days that this world finds itself in. And when the film does dare to venture beyond shock value, the potential is staggering.
It’s just a shame that some of the freakiest moments weren’t pruned in favor of something more biting, like the lunchtime trap that Martha finds herself in. After all, wolves don’t just wait around for a sacrificial lamb to show up in the forest and their teeth are rarely bared in public.
Grade: C+
“Rosebush Pruning” premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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