Moulding cruel or nihilistic characters into darkly attractive protagonists requires a deceptively delicate touch. We’ve grown so used to seeing it done effortlessly that a movie like Rosebush Pruning can perhaps be some useful reminder of how difficult it is to pull off. The latest from Brazilian sensualist Karim Aïnouz (of Futuro Beach and The Invisible Life of Euridice Gusmão fame) spends so much of its swift runtime affecting a transgressive atmosphere that it never quite gets around to making its caustic characters compelling or providing an outsider who might warrant our sympathy or concern. Why play funny games, you start to wonder, if there are no normies worth terrorizing?
Rosebush Pruning was written by Efthimis Filippou—the screenwriter behind basically every Yorgos Lanthimos film pre-The Favourite—as a contemporary reimagining of Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket, a vicious 1965 satire on the Italian bourgeoisie that the country’s cultural ministry would eventually add to a list of 100 films that most accurately reflected the national psyche. Aïnouz moves the action to Catalonia, yet the most interesting things about it are not the images we see but the actors whom Aïnouz has convinced to take part in his taboo scenarios. In one sequence that feels plucked from Lanthimos’ deliciously macabre early work, a son jerks off his blind father as the older man manically brushes his teeth—a moment that could have made headlines after the film’s Berlinale premiere this weekend even if the characters weren’t played by Tracy Letts and Callum Turner, the latter of whom is still bookies’ favourite to be the next James Bond.
It’s true, set in and around Girona, there’s about as much glisten to the movie’s roll-call of stars as there is to the opening vistas of the Mediterranean sea. Letts plays the wealthy, perverted patriarch of four adult children whose supposed all-consuming love of fashion rarely goes beyond dropping the industry’s most gilded names—although there is one playful sequence involving floating Bottega loafers. Chief among them is Ed (Turner), a gorgeous layabout who, between other things, claims to have given up on the written word. He’s the brother of Anna (Riley Keough), a dangerous flirt who enjoys teasing the local butcher almost as much as she enjoys teasing her older sibling, Jack (Jamie Bell), an icky infatuation that’s shared by the family’s youngest, Robert (Lukas Gage), who suffers from occasional seizures and, at one point—in one of the film’s many allusions to menstruation—takes a knife to his inner thigh and asks Jack to lick the blood off. Nobody gets to choose their family.
Lanthimos fans who’ve grown a little disillusioned by the director’s recent output will understandably read that synopsis and color themselves intrigued. Pruning‘s issues are less to do with its script than Aïnouz’s maximalist, scattershot approach to the text. Of this central foursome, we’re told on various occasions that Jack is the most kind and thoughtful—traits which the film does almost nothing to express, let alone use as any counterpoint to the incessant bad taste onscreen. For a moment, it looks as if that role will instead fall to Jack’s girlfriend, Martha (Elle Fanning), a classical guitarist who’s positioned as a sheep amongst the wolves but who soon falls victim to Aïnouz’s uneven characterizations—which, given the Sentimental Value actor’s screen persona, seems a wasted opportunity. Through Ed’s narration, we follow the plot to a reveal that’s about as signposted as the gory pruning that ensues.
The cast, for their part, are mostly up to the task and should be commended for taking on such outré material. Keough, no surprises, continues being an electric presence (with a performance somewhere downstream of the sleepy menace she brought to American Honey a decade ago), and Letts commits to the script’s absurdity with admirable relish (the sequence of him bopping along to noisy music in the backseat of a car easily draws a smile), but the performances rarely compliment each other and the resulting stiltedness only serves as an uncomplimentary reminder of the strange alchemy that Filippou achieved with Lanthimos on films like Dogtooth. Bringing the muscular intensity of his Nymphomaniac days, Jamie Bell, with all respect, is particularly miscast in what is surely Pruning‘s most pivotal role: the only bridge between the siblings’ toxic bubble and the outside world, as well as a link to their apparently deceased mother—who, as advertised, eventually appears in the form of Pamela Anderson.
As posturing and incoherent as all this is, the film deserves credit for not overstaying its welcome—at just over an hour and a half, Aïnouz races through Filippou’s script with minimal fuss and plenty of flare. Released in 1965, Bellochio’s original was a product of the same social anxieties that would eventually inspire Pasolini to make Salò a decade later—another work about the depths of depravity that can be plumbed when fascism is left to fester. At Berlinale’s press conference, Letts spoke convincingly about how extreme wealth divides eventually point societies in that direction, but Pruning‘s delivery of that message is muddled and far too frivolous to be impactful. (If this has a contemporary, it’s easily Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn—another starry and stylish provocation that ultimately lacked the courage of its convictions.) Like that film, Aïnouz’s will likely draw a curious crowd and even win a few diehard fans, but it lacks the charm of high camp and misses the mark as biting satire, landing with a splat somewhere in the middle.
Rosebush Pruning premiered at 2026 Berlinale and will be released by MUBI.