‘Rosebush Pruning’ review: Callum Turner, Elle Fanning and Riley Keogh head stylish, soulless Karim Aïnouz drama

Dir: Karim Ainouz. Italy/Germany/Spain/UK. 2026. 97mins

Everything means less than zero in Karim Ainouz’ second English-language feature (following 2023’s Firebrand), a portrait of a rich, dysfunctional American family loosely inspired by Italian director Marco Bellocchio’s incendiary 1965 debut, Fists In The Pocket. That was a howl of rage against a toxic mix of capitalism, Catholicism and conformism; this is a sometimes amusing smirk of irony directed at spoiled brats with too much money and too many designer clothes.

A sometimes amusing smirk of irony

Written by longtime Yorgos Lanthimos collaborator Efthimis Filippou, the script feels like a nostalgic attempt to relive the days of Dogtooth, when the Greek Weird Wave pioneered by the duo was still new and refreshing. This spiky black comedy is smart, cool and occasionally funny, in a bleakly cynical way, but it’s also surprisingly dull for long periods. It is, however, clever in its marketable, post-modern pairing of a hot, high-profile cast with flashy production values and desirable-for-some lifestyle markers.

That high-profile cast and the sheer stylishness of the exercise should find Rosebush (which counts Mubi among its backers) the hip urban audience it’s seeking after its Berlin Competition premiere, though it may not turn out to have great staying power. The film thanks several fashion houses in its end credits, and will likely end up selling plenty of the Bottega Veneta loafers and Comme des Garçons handbags it pretends to despise. The fact that it is also well aware of this is either amusing or depressing, depending on your point of view. 

The set-up is ostensibly similar to Fists In The Pocket. Three adult brothers and a sister all live together in a big villa with their blind father; all are emotionally damaged. For no obvious reason, the villa here is located somewhere near Barcelona, though we never hear any of the siblings even attempt to speak Spanish. We’re introduced to the quirks and foibles of the odd household largely through the voice-over commentary of Callum Turner’s edgy, skittish Edward, who makes up meaningless proverbs and has given up reading or writing.

Edwards’s sister Anna (Riley Keogh), the film’s least developed character, is a needy, repressed flirt, while beautiful, epileptic cross-dressing brother Robert (Lukas Gage) is a lost soul fixated on trying to win the affections of the oldest of the four siblings, Jack (Jamie Bell). The only one of the four to have at least attempted to fly the nest, Jack is apparently almost normal, albeit a little stressed out. He actually cares for someone outside the family, a free-spirited trainee classical guitarist called Martha (Elle Fanning).

Martha’s clearly augmentic freckles flag that there’s something a little off about her, an off-beat tone gleefully pursued in Fanning’s enjoyable performance. She gradually shakes off the aura of wounded innocence her character assumes when Jack invites her home for dinner and she is rounded on by his weird family, led by the jealous Anna and Jack’s irascible, unsighted father (Tracy Letts). Dad was left blind, it is revealed, by a reflection from the dazzling teeth of the siblings’ venal mother (Pamela Anderson), who no longer resides with the clan. It’s when the story touches on a particularly nasty form of incest that its quirky Wes-Anderson-goes-feral tone is exposed for what it is.

Abetted by Matthew Herbert’s arch score and Helene Louvart’s colour-drenched widescreen photography, this is a film that is at its most comfortable channelling the imagined musings of Donatella Versace or giving visual form to Edward’s recurring dreams of designer shoes flying high in the cerulean blue. It fatally falters, however, when it attempts to grapple with the kind of anger expressed in every frame of the Bellocchio film to which it pays meek homage.