by Hudson Moura
Jay Roach—whose career toggles between broad American farce (Austin Powers, Meet the Parents) and sober topical drama (Bombshell)—returns with The Roses, a contemporary reworking of the scorched-earth marital comedy popularized by The War of the Roses (1989). Headlined by Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, the film promises a comic duel and delivers, instead, a nervy dramedy in which British irony collides with American expectations—on screen and in the auditorium.
From the outset, Roach frames the couple’s unraveling not in sun-drenched Southern California but in a moody, Pacific-northwestern palette: grey seas, misted forests, and interiors whose cool elegance gradually curdles into arenas of psychological attrition. The geographical transposition matters. It literalizes the film’s central friction: a British sensibility—dry, elliptical, steeped in the power of the pause—translated into an American domestic spectacle. The most intriguing beats arise precisely in the interstices: the half-second of silence after a barbed aside, the mismatched laugh lines that play one way for the British characters and another for the American bystanders within the diegesis. The film is often at its sharpest when the joke’s “arrival time” is uncertain.
Roach orchestrates these moments through dialogue—waves of it. The script is conspicuously written, engineered around verbal feints, reversals, and precision strikes. Cumberbatch and Colman handle this high-wire language with effortless command; their timing, register shifts, and micro-expressions turn several exchanges into miniature set pieces. Yet the density of the repartee can be both exhilarating and exhausting. The narrative spine—escalation toward open warfare—feels deferred, as if subordinated to the pleasures of phrasing. Viewers versed in the 1989 template may feel the anticipated “total war” arrives late; the film lingers in attrition before breaking the furniture.
Tonal balance is the governing challenge. The Roses is punctuated with unequivocally funny passages, many of them born of British understatement. But the surrounding texture is heavier than the genre label suggests: marital grievance, class performance, and career anxiety accumulate until the affect bends toward family drama. Roach appears to wager that the cruelty integral to this subgenre is itself comic—laughter as a recoil from emotional harm. The wager pays off intermittently. Too often, however, the drama oversaturates the frame, leaving the comedy to feel supplementary rather than structuring.
The supporting ensemble functions as a counter-rhythm. Appearances by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon inject recognizably SNL-inflected absurdism—elastic faces, skewed line readings, and quick-hit non sequiturs. These interludes effectively puncture the couple’s combative eloquence, but they also risk predictability; the sketches are funny on their own terms while slightly undermining the film’s carefully cultivated British cadence. The result is a syncopated comic score: refined irony in the leads, zany riffing at the edges. Whether that composite enriches or distracts will divide viewers.
While The Roses openly converses with Danny DeVito’s The War of the Roses (1989)—anchored by Kathleen Turnerand Michael Douglas—its comic architecture diverges in key ways. DeVito’s film accelerates quickly toward operatic domestic warfare, with DeVito himself supplying a mordant, guiding presence that welds cruelty to farce. Here, Andy Samberg (alongside Kate McKinnon) offers an SNL-inflected release valve—amusing and occasionally sharp—but he lacks DeVito’s narratorial gravitas and caustic omniscience. The result is a different tonal equilibrium: Roach privileges densely written repartee and slow-burn attrition over the earlier film’s grotesque escalation, trading barbed cohesion for a patchwork of brilliant dialogue runs.
Formally, Roach directs with a craftsman’s steadiness rather than a stylist’s signature. The blocking privileges performance; coverage is functional; the cutting emphasizes tempo over visual invention. This restraint has virtues—it keeps the actors front and center—but it also limits the film’s escalation. When the narrative finally reaches its destructive crescendo, the staging lands more as an extended argument than as operatic farce. One senses an opportunity missed: the architecture of the house (and marriage) invites a more expressive spatial logic than the film consistently pursues.
Still, the virtues are considerable. The lead performances are uniformly superb, and the screenplay’s best exchanges produce that rare critical “click,” the small thrill when a line finds its exact target. If the film finally feels longer than its premise can comfortably bear, it compensates with intelligence, craft, and an unusually attentive ear. Audiences expecting wall-to-wall laughs—especially those carrying memories of the 1989 film—should recalibrate. The Roses is less a romp than a study in tone: a meditation on how humor migrates across cultures, and what gets lost, or sharpened, in transit. ist of domestic drama, Eenie Meanie might be worth the ride. Just don’t expect the engine to run smoothly the whole way through. 
3.5/5