Rosebush Pruning Review

Another Eat the Rich Satire That Aims for Provocation but Lands on Boredom

By: Marc Kozak

Rosebush Pruning

Another Eat the Rich Satire That Aims for Provocation but Lands on Boredom

By: Marc Kozak

Filmmakers just can’t seem to get enough of making movies about the lifestyles of the super-rich. It’s an obvious topic given the dramatic class inequality of our current times, an almost slam-dunk source of satire that instantly places the audience on the side of the filmmaker’s point of view. And sure, speaking as one of the common folk, it can feel good to see members of the wealthy elite taken down a peg or two, even if it’s only within the realm of fiction, the only realm in which these people might have to face any actual consequences for their destructive actions. The film and television space has seen a parade of these sorts of projects of late, from Succession to Parasite to Triangle of Sadness to The White Lotus to countless others. But you can only stay at even the greatest parade for so long before it starts to not be fun anymore.

Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning aims to shock and disgust you by leaning into the grosser sexual appetites of an ultra-rich family, but even that kind of thing seems old hat at this point – anyone who’s seen Saltburn or Game of Thrones has already seen their fair share of incest or semen gags. This is the kind of desensitized culture we live in, unfortunately. Still, this is the mode in which Aïnouz is operating, one in which the returns have been diminishing for some time, with not much being said that we all don’t already get routinely beaten into our skulls by checking the headlines of the news every day. It’s well acted by some very talented stars that we all know and love, it looks good and features some interesting musical choices, but there’s not much else here outside of some cheap thrills.

Callum Turner’s deadpan voiceover introduces us to a wealthy American family that has relocated to a luxurious home on the splendorous coast of Spain. We can tell from the voiceover that Ed (Turner) is not exactly a well-adjusted person with too much time on his hands, spending his days lusting after men on the beach, coming up with nonsensical proverbs, or recording his efforts to make his voice sound exactly like one of his brothers. At the very least, he seems to be the only one in the movie who realizes that his family is fucked up beyond a point of no return: “People are roses, families are rosebushes,” he muses before ominously adding, “and rosebushes need pruning.”

" The film and television space has seen a parade of "eat the rich" projects of late, but you can only stay at even the greatest parade for so long before it starts to not be fun anymore. "

The bulk of the movie dedicates its time to proving just how right Ed is. He believes that the only good person amongst the entire clan is the eldest sibling Jack (Jamie Bell), who is doing his best to escape the family by moving in with his relatively normal girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning). This potential move is met with derision by the youngest brother Robert (Lukas Gage), who is head-over-heels in love with Jack, and the lone sister Anna (Riley Keough), who crawls all over her brothers like a horny cat. The household is run by a blind and completely disgusting unnamed patriarch (Tracey Letts), who mourns the recent loss of his wife after she was supposedly eaten by wolves.

The siblings, despite all being in or around their thirties, have no jobs, no friends, and very few interests, content to hang around with each other at home while doing drugs, listening to music, and reading fashion magazines. They have the special type of boredom reserved for the extremely rich, raised in a kind of lonely prison that would almost be sad if they weren’t so despicable. Their outrage over Jack leaving the home is likely due not only to the disruption of their comfortable family unit, but also to their jealousy that one of them has actually made some kind of connection to the outside world. When Martha meets the family for the first time over lunch, they are cruel to her in that classically casual way of the entitled, ruthlessly mocking her handbag and breast size while smiling at each other with satisfaction as if Martha wasn’t right there in the room with them. It’s one of the few moments that feels the closest to anything resembling our actual reality, a kind of privileged rudeness that many of us have likely experienced before.

Ed, who was completely silent during that fateful lunch, tells us via voiceover that he likes Martha, and can tell that she and Jack are really in love from the simple way that they look at each other. Jack, whose viewpoint we don’t get nearly enough of, seems conflicted about leaving the family, even if he knows they are a roadblock to his happiness. It doesn’t help that Martha, an amateur musician, might only be in it for the money herself. “I refuse to keep begging for the simple things,” she says, sensing his hesitancy as the couple views a ridiculously lavish mansion overlooking the ocean. There are no truly “normal” people in this world, or if there are, they quickly become poisoned by proximity to wealth.

Still, Ed wants Jack to be happy, and in his mind, the only way for that to happen is for the rest of the family to go. Thus begins a haphazard and extremely silly scheme to murder everyone in the family one by one, including a surprise family member (Pamela Anderson) who is discovered to be living secretly off the family’s wealth and Jack’s misplaced generosity. At this point, you’re not really rooting for anyone to succeed or even live (oddly enough, it’s probably Ed that merits the most sympathy) but that’s kind of par for the course in all of these “eat the rich” movies: everyone’s a villain.

The screenplay – loosely based on the 1965 film Fists in the Pocket – was written by Efthimis Filippou, the longtime screenwriting partner of Yorgos Lanthimos. You can feel a bit of that Yorgos energy in the narration and some of the scene construction, but nothing ever quite coalesces into anything as interesting as The Lobster or the similar yet vastly superior Dogtooth. Rosebush Pruning is more a handful of scenes than a meaningful complete picture, content to rely on shock value and they-so-went-there moments. It’s engaging enough to watch, helped tremendously by the jarring electronic score and stylish cinematography (from the legendary Hélène Louvart), but in the end, its tedious thematic material and incessant desire to provoke make it a chore to watch.