Rosebush Pruning is the weirdest, dumbest film Yorgos Lanthimos never made

Ten minutes into Rosebush Pruning, a family gathers around a life-sized nude statue of their dead mother (Pamela Anderson), commissioned because there was no body to bury. She was, we’re told in a flatly dispassionate voiceover, recently devoured by a pack of wolves. It’s the darkest, dumbest possible punchline, and tells you just how few brain cells you should commit to any of this. This isn’t a solemn, searing eat-the-rich satire. Rosebush Pruning is just a silly little weirdo of a movie.

Director Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian filmmaker behind the queer melodrama Invisible Life and the elegant neon-lit noir Motel Destino, brings the same formal control here to a much dafter affair. After being announced in 2023 with Kristen Stewart and Josh O’Connor attached, it lost both to scheduling conflicts; Callum Turner and Riley Keough stepped in with Elle Fanning, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Tracy Letts, and Anderson to form a decadent group of creeps. Adapted loosely from Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 breakout classic Fists In The Pocket, a queasy portrait of a diseased bourgeois family, and scripted by Yorgos Lanthimos’ regular collaborator Efthimis Filippou, Rosebush Pruning follows a blind father and his four grotesquely wealthy adult children rattling around a stunning villa in Catalonia, and throws itself so hard into its own nonsense that you can’t help but admire it. 

Things descend into bloody madness when Ed (Turner) sees that his only decent sibling Jack (Bell) is being held back by his odious family. In order for Jack to be liberated, Ed needs to metaphorically prune the rosebush that is their toxic family. What unfolds is a thinking man’s idiot film: constructed with real cinematic style, talent, and intelligence, entirely in service of gloriously stupidity.

That dedication shows in the details. Ed refuses to read or write under any circumstances, a highly inconveniencing character quirk the film keeps returning to without it ever becoming less funny. Jack has a hunger for period blood that seems astonishingly sexy to all who learn of it. Before long the film introduces murder methods so cartoonish they’d feel at home in Looney Tunes, plus one impressively disgusting employment of a tube of toothpaste, where Aïnouz gleefully tortures the viewer, making its usage get increasingly depraved, and refusing to give us the respite of looking away until the job is well and truly done. None of this is a commentary on much, nor is it pretending to have some salient point about how hot young rich people actually behave. These moments are the film’s greatest assets.