Rosebush Pruning: strong performances and stylish visuals can’t save this hollow skewering of the ultra-rich

• Reviewed from the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival

There is an unmistakable auteur stamp to Rosebush Pruning, but it is not that of director Karim Aïnouz. It belongs rather to screenwriter Efthimis Filippou who, as long-term collaborator with Yorgos Lanthimos, can genuinely be said to have co-invented the Lanthimos style, specifically in 2009’s Dogtooth. But Rosebush Pruning feels a decadent, debilitated affair, a re-run of starker, more focused former glories: in all its prestige lushness, it’s essentially the Condé Nast Traveller version of Dogtooth.

Once again, a tyrannical father terrorises his infantilised adult brood in a claustrophobically enclosed domain that operates to its own laws – laws this time more ornate and more flamboyantly brutal, but equally dominated by the peculiarities of spoken language. But there is another acknowledged source here: Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 Fists in the Pocket. That film circulated around one son in a bourgeois family, the homicidal Sandro, in a quasi-incestuous relationship with his equally disturbed sister. In Rosebush Pruning, however, the madness is universal – everyone is deranged and dangerous. It makes sense that, towards the end of the film, narrator and Sandro surrogate Edward decides to hitchhike to Greece: Rosebush Pruning follows the logic of Greek tragedy, in which dynasties pursue the inexorable path to their own destruction. The presence of a wolfpack is also apparently a nod to Bellocchio’s invocation of the Thomas Hobbes dictum “Man is a wolf to man.” Between Hobbes and the Oedipal logic of this story (in which the father is blind), the Taylor family is comprehensively screwed.     

Apart from Jack, the alpha male in the Taylor pack – brutishly priapic with girlfriend Martha – the Taylor siblings are all preoccupied with sex but, like horny-minded but ill-educated kids, don’t really know what it is. The root of their trauma is the father whose nightly toothbrushing ritual is the film’s big shock reveal – and arguably one baroque touch of nightmare farce too much, pushing that bit too hard for effect.   

There is an unsettling, potentially stimulating disconnect between the film’s crafted visual language and its excessively elaborated script. Filippou loves to make people talk, often in knowingly cluttered, stilted style. This discordance is set from the very start, as Edward tells us in prolix voice-over about his relationship with his only friend George and about his passion for coining oblique proverbs. He also sets the pattern of the family’s obsessive, mantra-like dropping of fashion names (Versace, Demeulemeester et al).     

Things soon turn homicidal, in more gruesome and spectacular style than in the Bellocchio; and the killings are more obviously motivated, parental abuse clearly calling for filial revenge (in Fists, the mother was blind, and it was the implied crimes of the Mussolini-era bourgeoisie that called out for punishment). But while Bellocchio shocked 60s Italy with his assault on social, familial and religious pieties, Rosebush Pruning is old news: the feral derangement of the American super-rich has been thoroughly charted from Society (1989) to Succession (2018-2023), and now in every daily newspaper report. All this film can really do is pump up the horror, the glamour and the discordance between them.

It would be an injustice to Aïnouz (director of 2019’s The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmao and 2024’s Motel Destino) to play down his own auteur touch: this film clicks with his career-long commitment to queer characters and themes (notably, Lukas Gage’s Robert, wearing stockings as he mortifies his flesh) and the mechanisms of melodrama. And, especially in tandem with DoP Hélène Louvart, he is one of cinema’s master colourists: apart from the sanguinolent lushness of the dark reds, and the blazing evocation of sun-seared opulence, there are little striking touches like a daub of blue light on a dark green background, like a casually applied smear of oil paint.

The de luxe cast also serves Aïnouz to perfection. Riley Keogh plays up Anna’s hyper-sexualised petulance and princessy hunger for attention: her scenes upstaging Martha are uncomfortable, and very funny, as in Anna’s inept attempt to prove that she too knows how to play guitar. Pamela Anderson, as the revered matriarch, impressively continues her career renaissance, proving that she too can excel at crazed loftiness. And Elle Fanning is immensely likeable as the supposedly grounded, vulnerable outsider, before taking the chisel to Martha’s ingénue exterior. It says a lot about the film that two looks from Fanning – one a sublime WTF reaction, the other a final flash of side-eye to camera – says so much more than all the running, ravening wolves, the slow-motion cascades of designer shoes, the shock reveals and dick shots can begin to.