Berlinale's would-be scandal "Rosebush Pruning"

by Elisa Giuidici

Incest, murder, and the airless cynicism of extreme wealth: Rosebush Pruning positions itself aggressively as this year’s Berlinale provocation. Very loosely inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 debut Fists in the Pocket, Karim Aïnouz’s English-language drama borrows the earlier film’s diseased family structure but transplants it into the sterile rarefaction of contemporary ultra-wealthy excess.

Bellocchio’s earlier Italian classic centered on a wealthy young epileptic plotting to eliminate his blind mother and siblings to “free” his older brother from domestic obligation. Aïnouz retains the architecture of that premise while shifting the social register upward. Here the patriarch is a blind, theatrically transgressive father (Tracy Letts), alternately possessive and imperious, presiding over four adult children (Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Callum Turner, and Lukas Gage) already enriched by their late mother’s estate. Pamela Anderson’s absent matriarch - killed by wolves - haunts the film from its opening frames...

The family has relocated from New York to an opulent Spanish villa perched above the world they no longer meaningfully inhabit. They ride horses, discuss fashion houses, consume luxury as if it were oxygen. Taste is irrelevant; acquisition is everything.

If Bellocchio anatomized bourgeois malaise, Rosebush Pruning studies the psychological vacancy of the 1%. These characters are not merely privileged but structurally unmoored—so insulated from consequence that human connection curdles into something incestuous, competitive, or purely transactional. The film joins a lineage of contemporary satires about obscene wealth (Succession, The White Lotus, Triangle of Sadness) yet its tone is colder, more hermetic. Money here is less a social critique than a vacuum.

Lukas Gage, Callum Turner, and Riley Keough in ROSEBUSH PRUNING. Photo by Felix Dickinson

At the center is Ed (Callum Turner), our unreliable narrator and self-styled gardener of the “family rosebush.” In an early encounter with a Greek tourist—who speaks passionately about ancient history while Ed responds by showcasing his expensive shoes, the film crystallizes his emptiness. Ed senses desire but lacks the emotional literacy to act on it. He refuses to drive, hitchhiking instead; he refuses to write, outsourcing even the simplest communication to his sister. He invents aphorisms and tends roses as if cultivating metaphor could substitute for maturity. Turner plays him not as monstrous but as incurably stunted, a man who has never been required to grow up.

Ed decides that only his brother Jack (Jamie Bell, the supposedly functional sibling) deserves survival beyond the family’s toxicity. After meeting Jack’s fiancée Martha (Elle Fanning), he resolves to prune the “family garden,” himself included. Yet unlike Bellocchio’s film, which positions one brother as a potential escape route, Aïnouz sows doubt about Jack’s supposed normalcy. He appears pliable, perhaps even complicit, destined to replicate the same manipulative dynamics shaped by their father. The family’s pathology feels less like aberration than inheritance.

Tonally the film clearly owes more to Yorgos Lanthimos than to Bellocchio: a shift made explicit by the screenplay’s author, Efthimis Filippou. The emotional temperature is glacial; dialogue flirts with abstraction. But Filippou’s influence proves double-edged. Characters pivot abruptly in ways that feel less revelatory than arbitrary. Fannning's Martha, for instance, shifts from ingénue to manipulator without persuasive transition. The script often seems more invested in shock value than in psychological excavation. One senses an eagerness to engineer transgression rather than to earn it.

The shadow of Emerald Fennell also looms unexpectedly. Like Saltburn, this film pursues provocation as aesthetic strategy, mistaking taboo for depth. Incestuous tension and cruelty are brandished but rarely interrogated. The critique of wealth risks feeling cosmetic and gestures toward caustic satire that never cut as deeply as Buñuel or Antonioni (Bellocchio’s beloved maestros) once did when dismantling bourgeois hypocrisy. If Bellocchio unsettled by exposing moral rot, Rosebush Pruning unsettles by staging it decoratively.

Jamie Bell & Elle Fanning, soon to marry in ROSEBUSH PRUNING

And yet Aïnouz’s directorial signature intermittently breaks through the commissioned sheen. His visual palette remains lush and assertive; color pulses against the sterile environment. A dream sequence involving levitating shoes carries an almost Todd Haynes–like surreal charge. More crucially, he draws striking work from his cast. Turner embraces the character’s volatility and naiveté with unnerving commitment, while Anderson (despite limited screen time) suggests a parallel trajectory of attempted escape from the family’s gravitational pull. She and Ed, notably estranged in life, are the only figures who ever tried to imagine an existence beyond inherited toxicity.

Ultimately, Rosebush Pruning feels less like a fully inhabited Aïnouz film than a calculated entry into the Hollywood ecosystem, his second English-language apprenticeship after Firebrand. The visual command remains formidable, but the project’s conceptual scaffolding rarely allows his sensibility to flourish. For a filmmaker capable of moving fluidly between documentary intimacy, romantic melodrama, and politically charged portraiture, it is disappointing to see such formidable talent deployed in service of a provocation that never quite deepens into revelation.