Rosebush Pruning
Karim Aïnouz's dark comedy overindexes on lurid and shallow revelation. It's a textbook style-over-substance misfire
The wealthy are kinda perverted – we know this – but Rosebush Pruning, an unfocused satirical thriller, goes to overwrought lengths to reassert this consensus. Stylistically, Karim Aïnouz's film centres on the rudderless failsons and daughter of an ultra-rich New York family as they self-destruct in their hot ex-pat locale of Spain. With an outsize inheritance from their dead mother, they are both stunted and set for life, disturbed dilettantes ready to make their ennui everyone else’s problem, propelled, crucially, by some animating trauma from papa.
The film’s richly saturated visual palette has a painter’s vitality, but the viscera and carnal exploits are less resonant. In the maxi-prison of superficial transgressors, Emerald Fennell now has a cellmate in Aïnouz (Sam Levinson is in solitary confinement). These are the contrivances of a sick jester; obscene, yes; meaningful, no. Rosebush Pruning's try-hard psycho-sexual provocations, with its masochistic development and indulgent narration, is a blunt composite of superior influences: it’s Succession-cum-Salò, with the incestuous sybarite siblings of Cruel Intentions and The Dreamers. Its depravity amounts to something somewhat annoying, but mostly boring. The sequences in which wolves descend (Twilight’s goofy renderings seem more compelling) land as just one more self-insisting variable to desperately telegraph that we are watching is, indeed, wild.
A textbook style-over-substance misfire, Rosebush Pruning continually taps us on the shoulder to get our attention but has nothing to say when we finally turn around. This film is a feral dog dry humping your leg. Naturally, you can’t wait for it to be over.
Released 10 Jul by MUBI; certificate 18