Lead: At the Berlin Film Festival (Competition), Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning — starring Callum Turner and Elle Fanning — arrives as a high-gloss black comedy about a wealthy American family isolated on the Catalan coast. The film, written by Efthimis Filippou and loosely inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 Fists in the Pocket, skewers privilege through fashion-obsessed characters and corrosive family dynamics. Runtime is 1 hour 35 minutes, and the picture mixes sumptuous craft with deliberately uncomfortable tonal choices. The result divides: striking production values and performances sit beside a coldness that keeps true emotional engagement at arm’s length.
Key Takeaways
- The film premiered in Competition at the Berlin Film Festival and runs 1 hour 35 minutes.
- Director Karim Aïnouz leads a cast including Callum Turner (Ed), Riley Keough (Anna), Jamie Bell (Jack), Lukas Gage (Robert), Elle Fanning (Martha), Tracy Letts (father) and Pamela Anderson (late mother).
- Screenwriter Efthimis Filippou adapts themes from Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket, channeling deadpan absurdism familiar from Filippou’s work with Yorgos Lanthimos.
- Production craft is frequently praised: Hélène Louvart’s cinematography, Matthew Herbert’s score and Bina Daigeler’s costumes are repeatedly notable.
- The film’s core plot involves a schemed set of killings intended to free a son from a claustrophobic, incestuous-feeling household.
- Stylistically lavish but emotionally distant — critics are split between admiration for design and discomfort with characters’ soullessness.
- Frequent references to high fashion (Bottega Veneta, Comme des Garçons, Raf Simons, Cartier, Zara/COS) are central to character identity and satire.
Background
The Taylors, an affluent American brood, decamped from New York to Spain’s Catalonia coast six years ago after the matriarch — portrayed as an admirer of Antoni Gaudí — fell in love with the region’s architecture. The family’s reverence for fashion houses (they revere Cristóbal Balenciaga despite the designer’s Basque origins) becomes a marker of taste and social currency, and the film mines that obsession for satire. Filippou’s screenplay borrows the structural outline of Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket: a dysfunctional family, a blind parent, a sibling with seizures, and a murderous plan aimed at liberation.
Karim Aïnouz, whose prior films include Invisible Life and Madame Satã, brings a tactile sensuality and visual richness that often contrasts with Filippou’s chilly, cerebral absurdism. That collision of director and writer sets the tone: sumptuous surfaces and deliberate moral vacancy. The movie’s setting — coastal mansions, dazzling vistas and ritualized domestic spaces — functions as both playground and prison for the Taylors, whose members subsist on fashion, techno and mutual admiration.
Main Event
The plot orbits four adult siblings: Ed (Callum Turner), Anna (Riley Keough), Jack (Jamie Bell) and Robert (Lukas Gage), and their blind widower father (Tracy Letts). Pamela Anderson’s character is already deceased; her aesthetic legacy looms over the family. Early scenes establish the Taylors’ fixation on status symbols, from handbags to rings, and reveal the brittle resentments under their polished exterior.
A central thread follows Jack’s uneasy romance with Martha (Elle Fanning), whose introduction is played as a series of awkward, fashion-obsessed interrogations. Anna parses Martha’s outfit — guessing Zara/COS-level fast fashion alongside a Cartier ring — while the blind father, prurient and inquisitive, insists on details like the handbag’s label. These exchanges expose jealousy and class calculation, reframing intimacy as appraisal.
The film escalates into darker territory when the family’s plan to remove obstacles to Jack’s freedom emerges: a scheme of violence that echoes Bellocchio’s original structure. A repeated ritual — a monthly offering of a sheep carcass to keep wolves at bay — and other grotesque set pieces punctuate the narrative and foreshadow later betrayals. Ed’s odd rituals and proverb-making (including the titular rosebush aphorism) thread through the unfolding treachery.
Technically, Louvart’s widescreen compositions balance lush color and shadow, while Herbert’s score intensifies nightmare sequences (notably the first wolf episode). Costume work is showy and integral to characterization, and performances often sell the characters’ magnetism even as they reveal moral rot. The film’s final consequences are disclosed over the end credits, delivering a vindictive payoff that some viewers may find satisfying and others emotionally hollow.
Analysis & Implications
Rosebush Pruning trades in a lineage of European anti-bourgeois satire, yet it refracts that tradition through a fashion-obsessed, Anglophone family transplanted to Spain. Filippou’s script pushes absurdist deadpan and deliberate discomfort, techniques that have worked in previous collaborations with Lanthimos but here feel at odds with Aïnouz’s warmer, sensorial filmmaking. The tension produces striking scenes but also a persistent affective gap: the film can be admired more for craft than for empathy.
Artistically, the movie asks whether surface glamour can mask moral decay — and whether cinematic style can stand in for human feeling. By making luxury labels and aesthetic capital central motifs, the film satirizes contemporary status-seeking, but its characters are so unlikable that satire sometimes tips into mere nastiness. The result may be read as a deliberate provocation: an exercise in alienation meant to force viewers to reflect on privilege and entitlement.
For Aïnouz, working in English with a screenplay from Filippou signals a cross-cultural experiment that expands his portfolio but complicates authorial coherence. The film’s festival placement in Berlin’s Competition suggests confidence from programmers, yet the chilly reception from some critics may affect awards momentum. Commercially, the picture is likely to attract cinephiles intrigued by bold, stylistic auteur work but may struggle with mainstream audiences seeking emotional catharsis.
Comparison & Data
| Film | Year | Director | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fists in the Pocket | 1965 | Marco Bellocchio | Proto-bourgeois takedown; family murder plot |
| Dogtooth | 2009 | Yorgos Lanthimos | Deadpan absurdism, family isolation |
| The Lobster | 2015 | Yorgos Lanthimos | Satirical dystopia; Filippou co-writer |
| Rosebush Pruning | 2025 (Berlinale) | Karim Aïnouz | Fashion-led satire; high production craft |
Placed beside its influences, Rosebush Pruning shares structural and tonal touchpoints (family cruelty, absurdism), but it substitutes fashion fetishism and high-gloss cinematography where earlier films relied on rawer, grimmer textures. That stylistic shift explains both its visual appeal and the criticism that it feels emotionally skin-deep.
Reactions & Quotes
Festival and critical responses have been mixed; attendees note the film’s bravura design while debating whether its satire lands. Below are representative lines and their contexts.
“People love roses. Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning.”
Ed (character, film dialogue)
This aphorism, repeated in the film, encapsulates its moral logic: family bonds are framed as botanical problems to be trimmed. The line is emblematic of the movie’s repeated use of aphorism and ritual to justify extreme action.
“Selected for Competition at the Berlin Film Festival.”
Berlinale (official program)
Berlinale’s selection places the film on an international stage and signals curators’ interest in its formal ambition. That status raises expectations for critical and awards attention even if audience reactions are divided.
“A stylish picture whose emotional register remains intentionally distant.”
Festival critic summary (review)
Several critics have made similar assessments: praise for cinematography, score and costume design contrasted with reservations about character warmth. The consensus frames the film as technically accomplished but affectively restrained.
Unconfirmed
- Audience-wide reaction data and box-office prospects are not yet available beyond initial festival polling.
- Any awards nominations or distribution deals remain unannounced publicly at the time of this report.
- Reports about on-set creative disagreements between director and screenwriter are unverified and should be treated as speculative.
Bottom Line
Rosebush Pruning is a visually arresting, provocatively mean-spirited satire that showcases strong technical work and committed performances, particularly from Turner, Keough and Fanning. However, the film’s deliberate emotional coolness and the characters’ pervasive unlikability limit its capacity to create genuine audience empathy; the result is admiration for craft more than affection for its people.
For viewers drawn to formal audacity, social satire and fashion-infused allegory, the film offers pleasures and sharp, uncomfortable moments. For those seeking warmth or moral complexity, it will likely feel too glib. Its Berlinale berth ensures visibility; whether that translates into broader acclaim will depend on whether audiences and juries accept its austere mixture of style and bite.