Forget roses – we need to talk about violets of the shrinking variety, especially in reference to those who caught Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning when it premiered at the 2026 Berlin Film Festival. Bullish, battle-hardened critics suddenly saw red upon viewing this bone-dry, button-pushing comedy about nuclear-level family dysfunction based on a screenplay by Yorgos Lanthimos’ regular writing partner Efthimis Filippou. The silly, self-aware shenanigans of this film are played in the register of high absurdity, yet it also manages to deal with issues of status anxiety, sexual trauma and also what it’s like to be a kid who lives under the delusion that their mother was eaten by wolves.
Our guide through this world of egocentric spendthrifts is Callum Turner’s bumptious dreamer Ed, who we join as he’s hitchhiking his way home from Greece, having just enjoyed a relationship with a much older man he met at an expo. It’s never entirely clear what makes Ed tick and what he sees in this guy, but there’s enough residual fondness between the pair that dick pics are duly traded. He arrives back home to his asymmetrical modernist villa in the wilderness, where we meet his dominant older brother, Jack (Jamie Bell), fashion-obsessed middle brother, Robert (Lukas Gage), and sister, Anna (Riley Keough), who harbours some legally dubious passions for her male siblings. Lording over this clan of slumming wastrels is the father, played by Tracy Letts, a blind tyrant whose aggressive manner has clearly contributed to the warped worldview of his brood. The chips have fallen in a way that this family has become a designer prison, yet the inmates aren’t quite sure if they want to escape or burn the whole thing to the ground.
Aïnouz leans into his fawning, air-headed protagonists by creating a hyper-stylised world in which they can operate, and his film really pushes the notion that wealth leads to disconnection, which inevitably leads to transgression. Filippou’s dialogue comes across as a surreal satire on the type of dead-eyed fashionista parlance that’s become a mainstay of social media, and there is a healthy torrent of snarky zings at the expense of the family’s OTT sense of entitlement. While all the performers relish the film’s alienatingly ironic tone, the MVP is actually a supporting role from Pamela Anderson (to describe her character would be a spoiler, so we won’t), who in just a few scenes proves that she possesses absolutely killer comic timing.
There are some kooky elements – such as Ed’s ability as a voice mimic – and Rosebush Pruning is proudly a weird, bad time at the movies, but it’s also a film that selects its targets and then hits them with dead aim.
