‘Rosebush Pruning’ Berlinale Review: Ultra-Wealthy and Utterly Unhinged

In recent years, satires skewering the licentious, absurd, and often grotesque lives of the ultra-wealthy have multiplied for obvious reasons—largely thanks to a growing roster of real-life figures who might as well have walked straight out of one. This is, without question, the age of the eccentric billionaire, defined as much by public cruelty as by cartoonish egomania. And if what these people are willing to show in public is already this appalling—most folks tend to present their best selves out there—it’s hardly a stretch to imagine that their private lives, and those of their families, might be even worse. Once you start picturing what goes on behind closed doors, pretty much anything becomes plausible.

That’s essentially what Karim Aïnouz sets out to do in Rosebush Pruning: lock an awful, vindictive family inside a cavernous house and let them emotionally cannibalize each other in an anything-goes free-for-all that knows no boundaries. As is often the case, the problem lies in the form. Does a film about ugly, cruel, and idiotic people also have to be ugly, cruel, and idiotic? Many filmmakers seem to think so, and the Brazilian director—working here from a script by Efthimis Filippou, a frequent collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos—dives in headfirst, crafting a pitch-black comedy about a gaggle of deeply unpleasant, unhinged individuals who appear to live solely to hurt others… and each other.

Our guide through this familial horror show is Ed (Callum Turner), one of the four Taylor siblings who’ve relocated to Catalonia, where they rarely leave their massive estate. Ed, who for reasons unexplained can’t read or write and is obsessed with luxury fashion labels, has fallen in love with a Greek man and plans to move in with him—but not before narrating the family’s grim backstory, which includes a tyrannical blind father (Tracy Letts) and his children.

There’s also Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell), and Robert (Lukas Gage). Their mother has vanished (Pamela Anderson), and the siblings seem to spend most of their time subjecting one another to random acts of cruelty—offset, disturbingly, by a whiff of incestuous intimacy. The arrival of Martha (Elle Fanning), Jack’s girlfriend, throws the household’s warped routines into disarray and brings out the family’s most sadistic instincts, which good taste advises not detailing here. Let’s just say things escalate quickly, both with the newcomer and among themselves, and as narrative curveballs pile up, the atmosphere grows increasingly violent. From there on out, it’s a miracle if anyone makes it out alive.

Loosely inspired by I pugni in tasca, the debut feature by Marco Bellocchio—a filmmaker whose ethical and aesthetic sensibilities seem worlds apart from this sort of grotesque portrait—Rosebush Pruning slots neatly into the current wave of eat-the-rich cinema. Its most visible reference points might be the work of Ruben Östlund, especially films like Triangle of Sadness, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn or the earlier output of Lanthimos. But this register doesn’t quite suit Aïnouz. His films, while often sensual, erotic, and occasionally perverse, tend to approach their characters with a degree of warmth or empathy—qualities that are conspicuously absent here.

What remains is a patchwork of violent set-pieces, unpleasant to watch and at times narratively incoherent. Yes, the lives of the privileged one percent deserve a critical lens—but mirroring their own cruelty and disdain back at them may not be the sharpest strategy. It can be fun to fantasize about their downfall, sure—but that’s a pastime better suited to a sketch on Saturday Night Live mocking some pathetic millionaire and his nepo-baby entourage. Spending two hours in their company, on the other hand, feels less like satire than punishment.