In Berlinale Competition, Rosebush Pruning emerges as a sun-drenched, wickedly entertaining satire from Karim Aïnouz.
I have to admit that I wasn’t sure what to expect from this year’s Berlinale Competition movie, Rosebush Pruning. The plot follows a family of enormously wealthy, enormously dislikeable Americans who have moved to Spain to spend their money and their days in the Southern sun. From Parasite (2019) to Triangle of Sadness (2022), The Menu (2022), and Succession (2018), the lives of the spoiled, rich and famous have been dominating our screens in varyingly successful critiques of capitalism’s wealthiest victims. Rosebush Pruning lives up to the best of its contemporaries of this genre, directed by Karim Aïnouz and written by Efthimis Filippou, it was one of those Berlinale screenings that – although not especially devastating or politically bruising – was very fun to sit with for two hours on a Saturday afternoon.
Set in the Spanish countryside — sun-bleached, hyper-saturated, aggressively beautiful — the film’s colours are reason enough alone to go and see this movie on the big screen. Complementing the 1970s colouring of grainy yellows and blues is an amazing soundtrack – the film could work just as well as a music video as much as anything else. Brazilian director Aïnouz is himself a visual artist, which came as no surprise after watching this total treat for the eyes.
We follow a grotesquely wealthy, emotionally stunted family whose dysfunction veers between satire and farce. Their neuroses — vanity projects, petty rivalries, performative suffering — often seem more absurd than monstrous. From one moment to the next, we veer from the genuinely unsettling — real cruelty, incestuous emotional dependencies, the weight of inherited wealth — before being pulled sharply back into hilarity. The performances are dry and self aware; Jamie Bell is great as Jack, while Elle Fanning’s Martha is brilliantly destabilising and difficult to pin down.
Is it heavy-handed at times? Perhaps. The satire of plutocratic uselessness isn’t exactly subtle. But subtlety isn’t really the point – for me, Rosebush Pruning felt closer to a grotesque fable than a political thesis. Whilst other critiques I’ve read have been more harsh of this film’s clumsy, simplistic politics, I left the theatre nothing short of energised — amused, slightly bewildered, and grateful for cinema that is as sensuous and ridiculous as it is unapologetically stylish.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
