In Rosebush Pruning, Callum Turner leads a gorgeous, gloriously stupid tale of the obscenely wealthy and deeply depraved.
, a family gathers around a life-sized nude statue of their dead mother , commissioned because there was no body to bury. She was, we’re told in a flatly dispassionate voiceover, recently devoured by a pack of wolves.
It’s the darkest, dumbest possible punchline, and tells you just how few brain cells you should commit to any of this. This isn’t a solemn, searing eat-the-rich satire. Director Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian filmmaker behind the queer melodrama, brings the same formal control here to a much dafter affair.
After being announced in 2023 with Kristen Stewart and Josh O’Connor attached, it lost both to scheduling conflicts; Callum Turner and Riley Keough stepped in with Elle Fanning, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Tracy Letts, and Anderson to form a decadent group of creeps. Adapted loosely from Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 breakout classic , a queasy portrait of a diseased bourgeois family, and scripted by Yorgos Lanthimos’ regular collaborator Efthimis Filippou,follows a blind father and his four grotesquely wealthy adult children rattling around a stunning villa in Catalonia, and throws itself so hard into its own nonsense that you can’t help but admire it.
Things descend into bloody madness when Ed sees that his only decent sibling Jack is being held back by his odious family. In order for Jack to be liberated, Ed needs to metaphorically prune the rosebush that is their toxic family. What unfolds is a thinking man’s idiot film: constructed with real cinematic style, talent, and intelligence, entirely in service of gloriously stupidity. That dedication shows in the details.
Ed refuses to read or write under any circumstances, a highly inconveniencing character quirk the film keeps returning to without it ever becoming less funny. Jack has a hunger for period blood that seems astonishingly sexy to all who learn of it.
Before long the film introduces murder methods so cartoonish they’d feel at home in, plus one impressively disgusting employment of a tube of toothpaste, where Aïnouz gleefully tortures the viewer, making its usage get increasingly depraved, and refusing to give us the respite of looking away until the job is well and truly done. None of this is a commentary on much, nor is it pretending to have some salient point about how hot young rich people actually behave.
These moments are the film’s greatest assets.is so delicious to look at, Aïnouz luxuriating in every image and object at his disposal. The architecture is all avant-garde modernist lines, the color palette so bright and saturated it borders on gaudy, the fashion opulent and impractical in a way that whispers generational wealth.
None of it is hiding anything underneath, because there’s nothing underneath to hide: The whole aesthetic speaks to a beautiful artifice laid over people as shallow as a puddle. The cast mostly rises to this very specific task, none more than Letts, who scrubs away every trace of his usual charisma to play a father so repugnant it takes almost the film’s entire runtime to fully compute.
Keough is cruel and magnificently vapid as the only sister and default matriarch in her mother’s absence while Gage finds pathos as the horny, tragic runt of the family. Finding an emotional anchor in this bunch doesn’t work, though: Bell can’t pull off being the one sibling worth rooting for, and never quite convinces as the moral beacon the rest of the family reveres. But the film’s greatest misjudgements come from pacing rather than tone.
For a movie built entirely around delivering escalating jolts of insanity,spends a strange amount of time on subplots that generate none, most notably repeated stretches devoted to house-hunting, which drag precisely when the film most needs momentum. The lulls between its best moments run long enough that you start watching the clock, waiting for the next glee dose of weirdness to revitalize it.and a Ryan Murphy production with a traumatic brain injury.
It’s also an intriguingly perverse move for Turner—playing a vapid sociopath obsessed with his brother, roses, and dick pics—right as rumors swirl that he’ll be the next James Bond. That unlikely, foolhardy bravado is the whole film in miniature: A movie smart enough to know exactly how stupid it’s being, yet stupid enough to do it anyway.
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