Rosebush Pruning (2026) Movie Review: A Ravishing Satire That Seduces the Eye While Testing the Patience

Rosebush Pruning is a 2026 drama-thriller directed by Karim Aïnouz, written by Efthimis Filippou with source material drawn from Marco Bellocchio's seminal 1965 Italian film Fists in the Pocket, with additional writing credit to Bellocchio himself. Produced by The Match Factory, Kavac Film, and Sur-Film across Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, the film assembles one of the year's most striking ensembles: Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough, Lukas Gage, Elle Fanning (Predator: Badlands and Sentimental Value), Tracy Letts (A House of Dynamite), Pamela Anderson, and Elena Anaya. Set in a sun-drenched modernist villa in the hills of Catalonia, the story follows four adult American siblings living in gilded captivity under the thumb of their blind, tyrannical father, whose fragile grip on family order begins to collapse when eldest brother Jack announces he is moving out to live with his girlfriend Martha. The film had its world premiere at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 14, 2026.

The ambitions behind Rosebush Pruning are not small. Aïnouz, the Brazilian director known for Motel Destino and Firebrand, teams with Filippou, best known for his long collaboration with Yorgos Lanthimos on films like Dogtooth and The Lobster, to reframe Bellocchio's portrait of bourgeois dysfunction through a contemporary, queered lens. The result is a film positioned at the intersection of eat-the-rich satire, Greek Weird Wave sensibility, and maximalist visual art, drawing inevitable comparisons to Succession, Saltburn, and even early Almodóvar. Whether it fulfills that considerable promise is the film's central, contested question, and the honest answer is: only partly.

Story and Screenplay: An Ornate Frame Around an Underwritten Picture

The screenplay by Filippou constructs its world with a kind of deadpan fairy-tale logic that immediately signals we are not watching conventional realism. The family's mother, played in flashback by Pamela Anderson (The Naked Gun), was apparently killed by wolves in the nearby forest. The blind patriarch demands a lamb carcass be delivered monthly to the site of her death to keep the wolves fed. Ed, the film's narrator, names his pet theory about people "rosebush pruning," a phrase he invented specifically to make others feel intellectually inferior. These are the rules of a world both absurd and airless, and Filippou's fingerprints are unmistakable in every beat. When the screenplay is working, this heightened register produces sequences of startling, barbed comedy, particularly a lunch scene in which the family receives Jack's girlfriend Martha and the father, blind but weaponized, demands increasingly invasive physical descriptions of her from a delighted, vindictive Anna. It is the film's sharpest scene, worthy of Edward Albee at his most cruel.

The problem is that the screenplay too rarely sustains this level of controlled provocation. For long stretches, Rosebush Pruning mistakes escalating transgression for narrative momentum, cycling through taboo set pieces that titillate in the moment but accumulate into a kind of numbing overstimulation. The siblings' various compulsions and psycho-sexual fixations are established early and then largely repeated rather than developed, and the film's ostensible satire of patriarchal wealth and inherited dysfunction never quite sharpens beyond its general proposition: that obscene money produces obscene people. That observation, delivered with this much stylistic energy, carries weight for a while, but by the time the third-act violence arrives, the screenplay has not done the work to earn the emotional register it suddenly reaches for.

What rescues the writing from total incoherence is its brisk 97-minute pace and occasional moments of genuine wit. The script's fixation on designer labels, delivered with the same gravitas characters might reserve for matters of life and death, functions as an effective satirical shorthand. A reference to Balenciaga prompts near-ecstatic response; a Zara dress becomes a class crime. Filippou's collaborations with Lanthimos established his gift for making social performance visible through ritualized dialogue, and traces of that skill are present here. The film simply needed more scenes where that gift was actually deployed.

Acting and Characters: A Cast Working Harder Than the Material Deserves

Callum Turner (Eternity) carries the film as Ed, the nominal narrator and a man whose self-described mediocrity conceals a capacity for calculated manipulation that only becomes fully visible in the final act. Turner plays Ed with a studied aimlessness, a quality that is both the character's defining trait and, occasionally, a challenge for the audience's investment. There are traces of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley in the way Ed observes his family with cool, performative detachment, and Turner leans into that quality with genuine intelligence. The casting is not universally considered a perfect fit, and there is a legitimate argument that the role demands a different energy in its more theatrical moments. But Turner grounds the film's most unhinged sequences with enough of a straight face to prevent total collapse.

Jamie Bell's Jack is the production's clearest emotional anchor. As the sibling who has most successfully constructed a life outside the family pathology, Jack occupies the film's only recognizably human arc, and Bell plays him with a restrained empathy that consistently stands out against the broader, more stylized performances around him. Elle Fanning's Martha, the outsider who unwittingly destabilizes the household by simply existing, is written as a function more than a person, but Fanning invests her with a quiet specificity that makes the character's predicament feel genuinely uncomfortable. Their scenes together are the film's most grounded and consequently its most affecting. Riley Keough makes the most of a role that is largely defined by competitive desire and magnificent wardrobe, bringing a magnetic, unsettling quality to Anna that suggests a more complex character than the script allows her to inhabit.

Tracy Letts's blind patriarch is a study in controlled grotesquery, a figure of pure patriarchal appetite played without apology or mitigation. Letts commits entirely, which makes the character both effective as a satirical target and genuinely difficult to spend time with, which is presumably the intended effect. Pamela Anderson, appearing primarily in flashback and one late plot revelation, continues the art-house reinvention she began with The Substance, bringing an unexpected warmth and gravity to a role that could easily have been purely symbolic. Lukas Gage's Robert, perpetually epileptic and yearning, functions largely as comic escalation, and Gage delivers the performance the script asks for with evident commitment, even if the character never develops beyond his defining tic.

Direction and Technical Aspects: Aïnouz Delivers a Film That Looks Like Nothing Else in 2026

Whatever reservations one might hold about Rosebush Pruning as a piece of storytelling, its visual identity is beyond dispute. Cinematographer Hélène Louvart, whose previous work includes the naturalistic observation of Happy as Lazzaro and Never Rarely Sometimes Always, makes an emphatic stylistic turn here, flooding the frame with saturated greens, blood reds, and luminous yellows that transform the Catalonian landscape and the villa's modernist interiors into something between a fashion editorial and a fever dream. Each frame is composed with a deliberateness that signals the film's intention to be looked at as much as watched. The opening title card, crimson and gold held a beat longer than comfort permits, announces this register immediately.

Aïnouz stages the film's more outrageous sequences with a visual confidence that frequently outpaces the screenplay's ability to justify them. The production design, built around the villa's combination of brutalist architecture and accumulated material excess, creates a setting that physically embodies the family's condition: beautiful, hermetic, and suffocating. The costume design is equally precise, functioning as character notation throughout. When Anna attacks Martha's dress as suspiciously affordable, the camera has already told us everything we need to know about the symbolic weight these garments carry. The typographic credit design, meanwhile, is the kind of detail that suggests a director with genuine aesthetic ambitions.

The editing maintains the film's breathless forward momentum, rarely allowing a scene to breathe long enough for the audience to question its internal logic, which is both a strength and a strategy. At 97 minutes, Rosebush Pruning never becomes dull, but the pace occasionally obscures the absence of development where development should be happening. Aïnouz is a filmmaker with a clear and distinctive visual language, and this film demonstrates it confidently. What it also demonstrates is that visual ambition, however impressive, cannot fully substitute for the coherent satirical argument the material keeps promising and only intermittently delivering.

Music and Atmosphere: Sound That Promises More Than the Story Provides

Matthew Herbert's score is one of the film's most consistent pleasures, a pounding, propulsive electronic composition with clear debts to the synth architecture of the Pet Shop Boys, particularly the deliberately doomy 1986 track "Paninaro," which appears on the soundtrack to magnificent effect. Herbert's music operates as the film's emotional amplifier, pushing the bilious melodrama to heights that feel genuinely operatic, providing a tonal certainty that the screenplay occasionally lacks. The score tells us we are watching something urgent and excessive, and during the film's better sequences, it is entirely correct.

The sound design more broadly contributes to the film's atmosphere of sealed, pressurized domesticity. The villa's interiors carry the acoustic quality of a space in which every sound has nowhere to go, where voices bounce off expensive walls and emotions accumulate rather than dissipate. The contrast between interior acoustic claustrophobia and the vast, verdant outdoor landscapes captured by Louvart creates a productive tension, the sense of a family that possesses extraordinary space and has chosen, or been compelled, to compress themselves into a single airless house. It is one of the film's more eloquent formal observations, and it does not require a single line of dialogue to communicate it.

Strengths and Weaknesses

What works:

• Hélène Louvart's cinematography is exceptional, delivering some of the most visually arresting images seen in a 2026 film, with a saturated color palette that feels genuinely original.
• The lunch scene in which Martha meets the family is a masterclass in social cruelty, deployed with wit and precision.
• Matthew Herbert's score elevates the material consistently, lending sequences a momentum and emotional charge they might not otherwise sustain.
• Jamie Bell and Elle Fanning ground the film's most chaotic passages, providing an emotional legibility that prevents total alienation. Pamela Anderson's late-film revelation delivers genuine surprise and pathos in limited screen time.
• The production and costume design function as precise satirical instruments, making the family's pathologies visible through their material obsessions.
• The brisk pace ensures the film is never boring, even when it is frustrating.

What doesn't work:

• The screenplay's satire of wealth and patriarchal dysfunction never develops beyond its initial proposition, repeating its central observation rather than deepening it.
• Character development is sacrificed almost entirely to plot mechanics and shock escalation, leaving most of the siblings as defined by single behavioral notes.
• The film's protagonist question remains unresolved, switching perspective between Ed and Jack in ways that dilute both characters' arcs.
• Transgressive set pieces accumulate to a point of diminishing returns, with later provocations landing with less impact than earlier ones due to audience desensitization.
• Callum Turner, while capable, feels slightly misaligned with a role that might have suited a different energy.
• The satirical targets, rich people being awful, are dispatched without sufficient specificity to generate the kind of social critique the film seems to want to make.

Final Verdict: Gorgeous, Infuriating, and Impossible to Ignore Entirely

Rating: 6/10 stars

Rosebush Pruning earns its 6-out-of-10-star rating by being a film that achieves something genuinely impressive on almost every technical level while falling short of the satirical coherence its premise demands. It genuinely divides, not because its content is challenging, but because the gap between its formal ambitions and its narrative execution is wide enough to generate honest disagreement about what it adds up to. The middle ground is the honest one: a film that is well made, frequently entertaining, occasionally brilliant, and ultimately less than the sum of its considerable parts.

Viewers who will find the most to appreciate here are those drawn to visually audacious European art cinema, fans of the Greek Weird Wave who want to see its sensibility translated into a glossy, English-language register, and audiences with a high tolerance for transgressive content who are happy to follow style wherever it leads. The film also rewards those with a particular fondness for ensemble dysfunction, in the tradition of films like Dogtooth or The Lobster, and anyone curious about what Filippou's voice sounds like outside of his Lanthimos collaborations. For MUBI subscribers and arthouse regulars, Rosebush Pruning will almost certainly be worth an evening.

Those who need narrative coherence and character development to sustain their interest will likely find the film increasingly frustrating as it progresses. If the baseline requirement for satire is that it actually say something about its target with some precision, then Rosebush Pruning falls short, settling for aesthetic contempt when incisive argument would have been more satisfying. It is the kind of film that looks extraordinary in stills and feels somewhat hollow in motion, a testament to what cinema can achieve visually and a reminder that those achievements, however real, are not sufficient on their own. Watch it for Louvart's camera, Herbert's score, and Bell and Fanning's performances. Just do not expect the pruning to cut particularly deep.

Rosebush Pruning premiered at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival on February 14, 2026. UK and Ireland theatrical release date to be announced. Language: English. Runtime: 97 minutes.