★★★½☆

If there is one film that will immediately come to mind while watching Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning, which premiered in competition at the 2026 Berlin International Film Festival, it will be Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. Both are stories about power and desire, set against scenic backdrops, and relying heavily on the shock value of the material. 

Aïnouz’s feature opens in Catalonia, where siblings Jack (Jamie Bell), Ed (Callum Turner), Anna (Riley Keough), and Robert (Lukas Gage) live in an opulent villa, grieving their mother (Pamela Anderson) and putting up with the deranged demands of their blind father (Tracy Letts). When Jack, the eldest of the four and the linchpin of their family, announces that he is moving out to live with his girlfriend Martha (Elle Fanning), the illusion of harmony in their family cracks and Ed is forced to uncover the truth about their mother’s death. 

The film’s opening sets the scene up in a way that is tried and true, this family aligning well with the stereotypes of the obscenely rich but highly dysfunctional families in fiction. It’s an effective setup, though. It opens with Turner’s character and his voiceover providing context on the family’s situation and his siblings. The early humour is offbeat and dry, the content of his narration ludicrous but his tone deeply serious. The reason for the voiceover? Ed doesn’t read. Or write. Or drive. As he reveals in one of the voiceover segments, he prefers spoken word over writing. 

The absurdity of this statement and its delivery are almost fever dream-like. Tonally, this matches the visual atmosphere Aïnouz sets. In a world where the issue of lifeless and colourless film is growing, Rosebush Pruning stands out with its rich colours and proper saturation. The dreamlike visuals complement the narrative and help strengthen the psychological portion of this psychological thriller as everything the audiences are hearing and seeing feels as if it’s coming straight out of a hallucination. 

Where the film will inevitably draw comparisons to Fennell’s Saltburn is in its commitment to reveal the abuse and perversion that runs in this family as each new twist gets increasingly more shocking than the previous one. The natural response is to laugh, and the film’s comedy sometimes does hit the mark, but in a world where those in power indeed engage in behaviours that are at the very least as horrid as what’s on display in Rosebush Pruning, it is hard to keep finding humour as things get worse, a lot of the revelations feeling as if they are only there to elicit a reaction from the audience without necessarily contributing to the plot. A silver lining comes in the fact that the abuse and kink on display are fully contained within this family and they all contribute to it, although on different levels.   

Perhaps this knowledge indeed makes it easier to laugh throughout, which is fortunate as there is good humour to be found in this feature. A standout is a family dinner, a scene where Jack brings Martha over to meet his family. The shock value this scene brings is on the tamer side of everything that the film depicts but both Fanning and Letts nail their deliveries and, paired with the sharp writing of the scene, draw laughs from the audience. 

Rosebush Pruning will undoubtedly evoke mixed emotions. It is a film that hits all the boxes aesthetically but relies on the reprehensible to push its narrative forward. In the context of the real world, it seems wrong to laugh at it as things get increasingly dark. If one tries to look at the film solely in its fictional framework, though, the twisted nature of these characters and the actions that come as a result of it, turn into an interesting exploration of power and desire within a traditional patriarchal family.