L-R: Lukas Gage, Callum Turner (at back), and Riley Keough. Photo: Felix Dickinson
(97 mins, 18, in cinemas now)
Eat the rich. That’s what the spray-paint on the side of the bank enjoins us to do; has done since the days of Rousseau and the French revolution. Our tummy rumblings get more insistent with every newly minted trillionaire – but maybe they’ll eat each other first and save us the trouble? That’s if this disturbed vision from Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz and Greek screenwriter Efthimis Filippou is to be taken seriously. Big “if”.
Callum Turner, aka Mr Dua Lipa, heads up a hot’n’sexy ensemble, playing members of a fabulously wealthy, seriously perverted American family now living in Catalonia. As the film opens, middle brother Ed (Turner) is schooling his “best friend” George, a schlubby Greek guy he met 10 days ago, in the basic tenets of style – what to do when your hair starts to thin, how to spot a Bottega Veneta loafer in the wild; that sort of thing.
The super-rich clan in Rosebush Pruning. Photo: Mubi
Ed’s voiceover narration will then introduce us to rest of the clan: widowed father (Tracy Letts), who has a designer watch; sister Anna (Riley Keough), who has some cool go-go boots; other brother Robert (Lukas Gage), check out his new, colour-changing socks! All of them are equally obsessed with vapid nonsense, and all of them are incestuously devoted to eldest brother Jack (Jamie Bell). It is Jack and Jack alone, according to Ed, who is decent enough to deserve escape and a shot at a normal life.
Ed also insists that the family’s abundant wealth hasn’t affected their characters: “We always were interested only in music and fashion,” he says. “We’re all lazy, mediocre, vapid egotists.” But this is a good line precisely because it is clearly untrue. Maybe the family rosebush grows gnarled and thorny from the root, but it’s also been tended to in some very unconventional ways. Let’s just say that sticky white goo on the leaves isn’t a kind of fertiliser you can pick up at B&Q.
At its worst, the film feels like an episode of The Kardashians directed by Emerald Fennell
The super-rich, eh? What a bunch of sickos. As global wealth inequality increases, so too does our pop-cultural interest in the excesses of the 0.001%. Is it pure envy? Or are we audiences indulging our own decadent desire for distraction, rather than confronting the deeper causes of this chronic societal ill? Either way, Rosebush Pruning is the latest in a long line of films and TV shows to service this demand to gawp and mock, most notably and successfully the HBO TV shows Succession (2018-23) and The White Lotus (2021- ), and the Oscar-winning film Parasite (2019). But there are many more besides, plus the reality TV shows, too numerous to mention, which offer comforting reminders that money can’t buy love – and it certainly can’t buy taste.
Callum Turner in Rosebush Pruning. Photo: Felix Dickinson
Indeed, at its worst, Rosebush Pruning feels like an episode of The Kardashians directed by Emerald Fennell; a film about a vapid, self-consciously kooky family which is itself vapid and self-consciously kooky. The first act has a perfunctory way of locking and loading its many “Chekhov’s gun” plot points – like the fact that Robert has epileptic seizures. Or Ed has mastered an impression of his older brother Jack. Or, in one case, a literal gun. We’re thus primed to anticipate the third-act firing of these narrative weapons, with anticlimactic results.
But director Aïnouz improves on Fennell’s finest, with flashes of impressively outré depravity (Robert’s antics make Saltburn’s anti-hero Oliver look like a vanilla normie) and flourishes of style (Anna’s favourite powder-blue go-go boots are actually very cool, thanks to the unerring eye of German costume designer Bina Daigeler, whose other credits include Cate Blanchett’s minimalist tailoring in Tár and the Cristóbal Balenciaga miniseries.)
Pamela Anderson in Rosebush Pruning. Photo: Felix Dickinson
Rosebush Pruning also benefits from Pamela Anderson, in her career renaissance, as the late mother, and Elle Fanning as Jack’s girlfriend, Martha – a character given far more significance here than in Fists in the Pocket, the 1965 Italian film on which frequent Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Filippou based his script. Martha’s ordinariness is offensive to Jack’s family (“I mean, you couldn’t imagine how badly she dresses,” wails Anna), but she provides an essential straight edge against which to measure the film’s otherwise off-kilter morality. The scene in which our narrator, Ed, confronts Martha in a cafe-bar, and we’re suddenly allowed to see the family through her eyes, is revelatory in its strangeness.
There’s nothing in Rosebush Pruning to match the pointed satirical outrages of Marco Bellocchio’s original, and as an act of class warfare it’s both late to the frontline and oddly listless. But still, it amuses – fitfully, and in bad taste.
Ellen E Jones is the Nerve’s film critic. A writer and broadcaster, her book Screen Deep: How Film and TV Can Solve Racism and Save the World (Faber) won the Kraszna-Krausz Prize. She co-hosts the BBC’s flagship film and TV programme, Screenshot, on BBC Radio 4, and won the Broadcasting Press Guild’s Presenter of The Year, 2025.