Name: Rosebush Pruning
Director: Karim Aïnouz
Genre: Comedy, Drama, Thriller
Released: 2026-07-10T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 95 min
Cast: Callum Turner, Riley Keough, Jamie Bell, Lukas Gage, Elena Anaya

A family with this much money should be able to buy its way out of almost anything. The four grown siblings at the center of Rosebush Pruning cannot buy their way out of each other. They share a Spanish villa with high ceilings, good light and a father who cannot see them but rules them all the same, and the house has slowly become the only world any of them has left.

Karim Aïnouz films their confinement as a kind of luxury terrarium. The servants are mocked, the meals are rituals, and the siblings circle one another with the casual menace of people who have never once had to be polite to anyone who matters. The story, such as it is, turns on two small ruptures: the eldest brother wants out, and one of the others starts asking how their mother actually died.

The casting is the argument. Jamie Bell plays Jack, the brother who passes for normal and wants to move a girlfriend into the compound — Elle Fanning’s Martha, an outsider whose ordinariness reads, inside these walls, as a kind of provocation. Riley Keough and Lukas Gage play Anna and Robert as the feral wing of the family, siblings whose closeness has curdled into something the film refuses to look away from. Callum Turner’s Ed is the one who starts pulling threads. Tracy Letts, blind and immovable, is the gravity they all orbit.

For all its menace, the film plays as comedy first. Aïnouz and Filippou pitch the cruelty at a deadpan register, where an outrageous line lands flat and the laugh arrives a beat later, once you have caught what was actually said. The mode is closer to chamber farce than thriller — too many bodies in too few rooms, manners stretched well past breaking — and the dread accumulates precisely because everyone keeps behaving as though nothing is wrong. It is the rare eat-the-rich picture that is genuinely funny rather than merely savage.

Aïnouz has spent his serious-mode films studying how power settles into intimate rooms — a mother and daughter severed by mid-century patriarchy, a queen surviving a murderous king, a couple burning each other down in a roadside motel. Here he trades the warm melodrama of those pictures for something colder and a great deal funnier. The villa is gorgeous and the people inside it are rotting, and he lets that contrast do the editorial work rather than underlining it for us.

The villa does a great deal of the talking. Shot in warm wood and stone, all mid-century lines and tall windows onto a landscape no one ever seems to enter, it is the kind of house that photographs as a sanctuary and operates as a cell. Aïnouz keeps the camera patient and the compositions close to symmetrical, so that even the cruelty arrives framed like an advertisement. The beauty is not decoration; it is the argument. This is what the money bought, and it is quietly killing the people who live inside it.

The bones come from elsewhere. Rosebush Pruning is a loose reworking of Marco Bellocchio’s I pugni in tasca — Fists in the Pocket — the 1965 debut in which a young man decides the most loving thing he can do for his family is to start killing it. Aïnouz keeps the central provocation, that a household can be a sickness and that liquidating it might pass for a cure, and hands the screenplay to Efthimis Filippou, the writer behind Dogtooth and The Lobster. Filippou’s fingerprints are everywhere: the deadpan cruelty, the family treated as a closed grammar of rules, the comedy that lands a half-second before the horror does.

What the film does not quite settle is whether it has anything to say about wealth beyond watching it fester. Aïnouz has described the project as an attempt to “burn down the house and build a new house,” but the burning is far more vivid than the building; the satire is sharp on the symptom and vague on the cure. And it runs the risk that shadows every eat-the-rich picture made with this much craft — that the beautiful villa, the magnetic cast and the immaculate framing end up seducing the viewer into precisely the envy the film means to indict. Rosebush Pruning is aware of the trap. It does not entirely escape it.

The cast of Rosebush Pruning, directed by Karim Ainouz, inside the Spanish villa, 2026 — The family in *Rosebush Pruning* (2026)

Pamela Anderson appears as the mother whose death sets the questions running, and Elena Anaya rounds out the principal cast. The film runs ninety-five minutes and was assembled as a European co-production — German, Italian, British and Spanish money behind a thoroughly international ensemble — with MUBI handling distribution. It premiered in the main competition at the Berlinale, where it was nominated for the Golden Bear.

MUBI opens Rosebush Pruning in the United Kingdom on July 10, with the United States release following later in the month after a festival bow at MUBI Fest Chicago; Italian audiences get it first, on July 8. It is the kind of film best seen in a room full of strangers — the better to hear who laughs and who goes quiet.