by Hudson Moura
Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning, written by Efthimis Filippou and based on Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket, begins in deceptively elegant fashion. On a beach, Edward Taylor (Callum Turner) gives etiquette and fashion advice to George, a doctor attending a medical conference, while the blue sea stretches behind them and Edward’s narration immediately establishes his peculiar worldview. He is fascinated by aphorisms such as “People are roses, families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning,” and for him rosebushes are not merely a metaphor but almost erotically charged, an early indication that this family inhabits a world governed by eccentricity, obsession, and unsettling desires.
The six family members have moved from New York to Spain in search of a new beginning, escaping the cold of the American East Coast for a spectacular house chosen partly because of the six deer statues at its entrance. Their cultural references oscillate strangely between generations: the mother was supposedly drawn to Spain by Gaudí, while her children seem more interested in Balenciaga. The father (Tracy Letts) is blind, and the dead mother survives as both memory and grotesque mythology: according to him, she was killed by a pack of wolves, while a nude statue of her remains in the house like a family monument. Every month, they leave a lamb at the site of her death so the wolves will be fed and, supposedly, spare another innocent victim.
From there, the film becomes an increasingly bizarre portrait of familial dysfunction. Edward regards most of his relatives as egotistical creatures interested primarily in music, fashion, and themselves, while Jack (Jamie Bell) occupies a special place in his imagination: sexy, intelligent, and charming, but fascinated by blood—menstrual blood, animal blood, blood almost as an object of desire. These eccentricities are not incidental details; they are the substance of the family. Rosebush Pruning constructs a universe in which strange rituals, sexual impulses, cruelty, narcissism, and aesthetic sophistication coexist so naturally that absurdity gradually becomes the family’s ordinary language.
This is also what makes the film feel so unusual within Aïnouz’s body of work. It is difficult to immediately connect its aggressively absurd universe with the more humanistic and realistic sensibility associated with films such as Madame Satã, Invisible Life, or Motel Destino. Perhaps the bridge lies in Aïnouz’s continuing fascination with people whose behaviours and desires move outside social norms. Here, however, that interest is pushed into a far more artificial and grotesque register.
The film feels much more immediately aligned with Efthimis Filippou’s screenwriting universe, particularly the unsettling absurdism associated with Dogtooth, The Lobster, and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. The dialogue, strange behavioural codes, emotional detachment, and matter-of-fact presentation of disturbing ideas all belong comfortably within that tradition. Characters speak and behave as though the most abnormal impulses were perfectly reasonable, creating a constant tension between comedy, discomfort, and menace.
As an absurdist tale, Rosebush Pruning pushes its limits primarily through story and behaviour rather than visual excess. That does not mean the images are secondary. On the contrary, the cinematography is remarkably precise: compositions are controlled, spaces are carefully organized, and the film frequently produces images that are simultaneously odd and aesthetically beautiful. The visual elegance creates a productive contradiction with the grotesque family dynamics unfolding within the frame.
Beyond its eccentricities, the family can also be read as a product of extreme privilege. These are people insulated by wealth, with few material needs or conventional ambitions, whose isolation seems to allow narcissism, incestuous desire, cruelty, and bizarre rituals to flourish almost without consequence. In this sense, Aïnouz and Filippou update the bourgeois family dysfunction of Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pocket into a contemporary satire of inherited wealth and patriarchy. Jack’s attempt to leave this closed universe with Martha (Elle Fanning) becomes particularly significant: his departure threatens not simply the family structure but an entire system that survives by keeping its members trapped within it.
The result is a film that is deliberately difficult to stabilize. It is at once family drama, grotesque comedy, psychological provocation, and an almost surreal study of inherited dysfunction. Not every eccentricity necessarily carries the same dramatic weight, and the accumulation of bizarre behaviours can sometimes make the film feel more fascinated by its own strangeness than by its characters. Yet that excess is also central to its identity. Rosebush Pruning is less interested in making this family psychologically understandable than in exposing it as a diseased ecosystem—a rosebush whose members may ultimately believe that survival requires somebody to be pruned.
Rating: 3/5