Khushi Jain cashes out for family drama Rosebush Pruning.
The protagonist and narrator of Rosebush Pruning describes himself and his siblings as ‘lazy, mediocre, vapid egotists’, words that the writer of this review will readily use for the film itself. Karim Aïnouz’s second English-language feature (which premiered in Berlin this year) raises the question: do we really need more media about filthy rich Americans going batshit crazy in European glass houses? To which the Brazilian director answers: ‘Yes, absolutely.’
Rosebush Pruning is a film you’ve seen before, and not only because it is loosely based on Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 I pugni in tasca. The story is soaked in the same blasphemies of incest, abuse, sexual perversion, materialism, murder and power that all other stories about the insensibly wealthy are. Aïnouz begins his film with a narrative voiceover from Ed (Callum Turner), one of four siblings who live with their blind father and a naked statue of their dead mother in a lavish bungalow in the Catalan mountains. Ed mistrusts the written word, doesn’t drive, loves making his own proverbs and enjoys masturbating in the rose bushes. Like his siblings, Jack (Jamie Bell), Anna (Riley Keough) and Robert (Lukas Gage), he is fashion- and music-obsessed.
After their mother was mauled to death by wolves, the thirty-something-year-olds inherited enough money never to have to work, while amply indulging in haute couture purchases and automobiles without roofs. The siblings are less people and more objects. For one, they are covered in brand insignia, on top of which they then go about posing and draping themselves all over the house like surrealist sculptures. And if they are décor, their blind father (Tracy Letts), with his cane of gold and toothpaste-based sexual fantasies, is decay.
The music is always a little too loud and a little too jarring in this house in the hills. So, when Jack, the eldest (and relatively the most sensible of the bunch), invites his new guitarist girlfriend, Martha (Elle Fanning), for lunch, there is a palpable shift in the background noise. Ed, Anna and Robert love Jack in their own twisted ways, which, for Ed, means seeing his brother in a happily-ever-after with Martha. And thus he sets about murdering the entire family and liberating Jack from their collective, genetic insanity.
Flies buzz around during meals, throbbing beats tear through speakers and sex is never off the table. This aesthetic madness is sealed with Ed’s hollow commentary and jump cuts to roses, as though the film is continuously authorising itself. Even in the way the characters move, behave, drive, react, eat, dress and swim, there is an explanation. The psychosexual bacchanal, along with the emotionless participants, needs to be premised, argued and concluded. This dilutes the shock value of its perversions.
The story is an orgy that borders on cartoonish and, in this world, cruelty soon becomes digestible. This is underpinned by an oversaturated visual style with an abundance of primary colours, rhythmic cuts and ‘edgy’ sequences. A big maternal reveal halfway through presents exciting narrative opportunities, but writer Efthimis Filippou (known for his collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos) places the focus instead on the safer ground of kink and murder.
A saving grace of the film is costume designer Bina Daigeler. The characters in Rosebush Pruning are scripted to be hyper-aware of their clothing, but Daigeler somehow manages to turn them into fashionably constructed mistakes. They are effortless, shopping online and bidding on expensive Birkins, but there is always something slightly wrong. Fabric and accessories do more than the rest of the mise en scène combined. It is Daigeler’s genius that, despite limitless credit cards, the clothes only almost fit.
Speaking of things that almost fit, Callum Turner, as Ed, is at home playing a spoilt, well-dressed rich boy. In some ways, Ed is reminiscent of Thomas Webb from 2017's The Only Living Boy in New York, just a tad more pretentious and murderous. Jamie Bell gives a decent performance as the eldest who has tasted the edge but is a smidge away from going over. Riley Keough and Lukas Gage do their best with their one-dimensional crazy, but it is Elle Fanning who proves herself, yet again, as a standout, with her brief but memorable supporting role.
The best bit of Rosebush Pruning comes at the very end in the form of an abruptly cut ending sequence. The strength in narrative ambiguity finally makes a brief appearance half a second before the credits roll. But alas, it is too late.
Rosebush Pruning is in cinemas 10th July 2026.
