Yes, this is me asking you to watch a film that tops every film critic’s “pretentious avant-garde indie” crown at this moment. If you’re on MUBI, which in my view is the only streaming service worth having, you’d certainly have seen Rosebush Pruning on the platform billboard.
Directed by Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian director known for films like Motel Destino (2024) and The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão (2019), Rosebush is the story of a f**k-ed-up family living a cossetted life in the mountains of Spain’s Catalonia. Their absurdly huge house with a creepy soullessness houses the family’s near-invalid patriarch (just ‘Father’; Tracy Letts) and his four adult children (Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Elle Fanning, Riley Keough, Lukas Gage). They have interpersonal relationships that it wouldn’t quite do justice to call ‘disturbing’. The mother (Pamela Anderson) rests as a naked statue in a patio, a couple of years after falling prey to wolves and being devoured by the ferocious animals in the woods nearby.
I’m not saying this is something you haven’t seen before. The rich and their pathological derangement is a theme anyone can sniff from a mile away. You’ve seen this stilted narrative style and distorted sense of reality in the films of Yorgos Lanthimos, particularly Dogtooth. Screenwriter Efthymis Filippou, who’s worked on Lanthimos on several of the Greek auteur’s most-watched films, has done the screenplay for Rosebush. On television and streaming, this tradition of dysfunctional, obscenely rich clans has been most recently and memorably established by Succession.
This is not even to say that Rosebush matches the level of craft or narrative resolution that the above are known for.
Aïnouz’s film is by no benchmark masterful or genius–it tries to do almost exactly what Marco Bellocchio did with Fists in the Pocket sixty years ago. No matter how imaginative its contrivances get: degenerate American rich family living in a self-exile of sorts in Spain, incest married to queer repression within the family, the said family’s obsession with brands and designers, the narrator’s tendency for coining meaningless phrases like ‘rosebush pruning’ and strange infatuation for George that’s the anticlimactic kick-off this bizarre game of psychosurrealism.
Which is why the film becomes an extremely glamorous, lushly shot (cinematography by Hélène Louvart) vehicle for our accumulated hungers for awkwardness. Where this film probably outscores all of Lanthimos’–pardon my insolence–films is its position on the discomfort-watch meter. We can drop all our reality show binges and gag on the icks that Rosebush refuses to prune, maintaining a wicked smile and nasty side-eye all along.
Spoiler alert; skip if you plan to watch: What I mean is that this film isn’t really plot as much as it is an exercise in expectation-breaking. Aïnouz and Filippou keep building the world of the movie up and then distorting it. For instance, the oldest son, Jack (Bell), is set up as the character to root for–the sole image of sanity in this menagerie of perversions–and soon enough revealed to be himself compromised in the psychosexual abnormality of his family. Similarly, after establishing the mother as dead and the twisted family dynamics that have followed ever since as partly a consequence of that, the film springs her up casually.
I might be reaching here but this could be read as an experiment with the nature of narrative itself. How are films/stories designed to impact us? What if two and two add up to be six? What if ice doesn’t form when you freeze water?
In order to separate the Lanthimos-inflected tonal fatigue of the director’s work, I watched Motel Destino, his other film, a tantalising specimen of fine Brazilian noir, available on MUBI. And then, since the plot or the conceit aren’t entirely original, reading up more about it online sent me to Bellocchio’s highly rated aforementioned movie, also on the same streaming platform, next up on my list.
Riley Keough and Lukas Gage are disgustingly good as the siblings most unhinged in their obsession for Jack. Their performances made me flinch and wince all the way, until the film’s messy end. It was a relief they were all very dead.