Rosebush Pruning – Film Review

Director – Karim Aïnouz
Writers – Marco Bellocchio, Efthimis Filippou
Stars – Callum Turner, Elle Fanning, Lukas Gage, Jamie Bell

When Martha (Elle Fanning) meets Jack (Jamie Bell), she thinks she’s found the perfect man. He’s bright, handsome, and very rich — but everyone comes with baggage. Jack’s just happens to include a whole collection of ghouls in his deeply unorthodox family.

Jack lives at home with his father (Tracy Letts), his two brothers, Ed (Callum Turner) and Robert (Lukas Gage), and his sister, Anna (Riley Keough). They are an unusual family: close-knit, but all damaged in different ways. The story is told from Ed’s (Callum Turner) perspective. At first, he seems to be the one holding things together on some basic level, but the more we see of him, the more apparent his flaws become.

The film is written by Marco Bellocchio and Efthimis Filippou. Filippou is best known as the co-writer of The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and Dogtooth, all directed and co-written by Yorgos Lanthimos. This is the kind of challenging, unsettling work you would associate with him, full of loose ends and bizarre happenings. It is directed by Brazilian Karim Aïnouz, who is probably best known for The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão.

With a cast full of A-list actors and a backdrop of stunning houses, the film initially seems poised to deliver another exposé of wealth and family dysfunction. It’s a subject we’ve seen many times before, but here it’s approached in a mean-spirited fashion. These characters feel less like self-absorbed young adults with too much time on their hands and more like vampires, feeding off one another in increasingly unsettling ways.

At times, it feels as though you’re watching a Wes Anderson film that has turned nasty. The characters are self-loathing and largely useless, obsessed with brands and appearances over anything of real importance in their lives. It becomes clear fairly early on that there isn’t a single character to relate to, or even one with a functioning moral compass. Had the film leaned further into comedy or embraced something more outrageous, it might have worked better, but as it stands, it often feels faintly vindictive and cruel.

There are strong performances, with Elle Fanning once again stealing many scenes, often through nothing more than her facial reactions to what others are saying about her. Jamie Bell, meanwhile, plays the family member who seems the least damaged, and one of the few capable of a degree of self-awareness. Overall, while there are many impressive individual elements, it feels less than the sum of its parts. It’s filled with odd rhythms, emotional blankness and narrative loose ends that seem designed to leave the audience slightly off balance.