by Nataliia Serebriakova
Worth: $10.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Berlin International Film Festival
Cast:
Callum Turner, Tracy Letts, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough, Lucas Gage, Pamela Anderson, Elle Fanning
Intro:
… spectacle without substance: a film that gestures toward scandal and intensity but offers little emotional resonance or intellectual insight in return.
Ed (Callum Turner) is a twenty-two-year-old gay man who has never had sex. He begins his narration on a beach, sitting beside an older friend with whom he hopes to become intimate. But the friend leaves him and departs for Greece. This brief introduction sets in motion the story of a deeply peculiar family — though at first it is impossible to imagine just how unhinged they are.
The unnamed patriarch (Tracy Letts) is blind and every evening retreats to the bathroom with his eldest son, Jack (Jamie Bell). Supposedly, he requires assistance brushing his teeth. Anna (Riley Keough), the only woman in this male-dominated household, is, like Ed, inexperienced, yet fantasizes about sleeping with Jack during her menstrual cycle. Robert (Lucas Gage) also seems drawn to his older brother, though for now, he limits himself to dressing in women’s stockings. The only member of the family who is believed — at least by Ed — to have an active sex life is Jack, the most “successful” of the children, though this assumption will later prove not entirely accurate. He has a girlfriend, Martha (Elle Fanning), a guitarist who endures verbal humiliation from the rest of the family when she is introduced to them at dinner. Jack himself has a particular fixation: he is aroused by the taste of blood.
According to family legend, the mother (Pamela Anderson) was torn apart by wolves and buried in the forest. Yet on the family’s villa grounds stands a posthumous monument to her — a nude female figure.
In recent years, Brazilian director Karim Aïnouz has demonstrated remarkable productivity. While his 2019 film The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão was a cinephile-oriented, slow-burning story about women, last year’s Motel Destino (presented in Cannes) and especially this year’s Rosebush Pruning (in competition at the Berlinale) lean increasingly toward the mainstream.
A loose remake of Marco Bellocchio’s 1965 film Fists in the Pocket, and boasting a first-rate cast, Rosebush Pruning is nonetheless not entirely successful. Pretentious, visually striking, and impeccably crafted in terms of cinematography, it ultimately feels hollow in meaning and cinematic substance. The family portrayed in the film is obsessed with designer objects and consumed by twisted desires for one another — like a snake devouring its own tail. Aïnouz radically reinterprets Bellocchio’s original, which merely hinted at incestuous tensions, making them explicit and inserting scenes that border on the grotesque, seemingly under the assumption that they will be perceived as humorous. This is humour not at the edge of bad taste, but well beyond it.
Despite its undeniably attractive cast and its polished, visually seductive surface, the film ultimately collapses under the weight of its own provocations. The transgressive elements feel less like a meaningful exploration of taboo and more like a calculated attempt to shock. Instead of psychological depth, the characters are reduced to caricatures defined by their perversions, and their dysfunction never evolves into genuine tragedy or sharp satire. The aesthetic beauty — the composed frames, the tactile interiors, the luminous faces — becomes a decorative veil that cannot conceal the narrative emptiness beneath. What remains is spectacle without substance: a film that gestures toward scandal and intensity but offers little emotional resonance or intellectual insight in return.
