The Roses is a marriage story.
When architect Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and aspiring chef Ivy (Olivia Colman) meet in London, it is love at first sight. Ivy wants to move to America so that she can pursue her dream of opening a restaurant. Theo impulsively decides that he wants to move with her. (Take that, Britain!) They marry and the film follows them as they settle in California and pursue success in their respective fields while raising precocious twins. At first, Theo has more success than Ivy but that changes when a freak storm causes one of Theo’s buildings to collapse on the same night that it also causes hundreds of stranded tourists to suddenly show up at Ivy’s restaurant. Ivy becomes a success while Theo, who is now basically unemployable, becomes a stay-at-home dad. Theo starts to resent Ivy’s success. Ivy starts to resent the amount of time that Theo spends with their daughters. Looking to fix their fraying marriage, Theo design an ultra-modern and chic home for them. Needless to say, by the end of the movie, Theo is being chased through the house by a gun-wielding Ivy.
Oh, Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. They’re both good actors and I’ve appreciated many of their past performances but, watching them in The Roses, I do have to admit that I realized that I’ve started to get a bit bored with both of them. Their performances here all about technique. Cumberbatch does his barely repressed anger thing until eventually he explodes into a frantic fury. Colman does her cutting barb followed by a goofy smile thing. Neither performance really has much emotional depth and, even when they’re supposed to be happy, you don’t really buy them as a couple for a second. Even when they blow up at each other and fully embrace their growing hatred, it doesn’t have much of an emotional impact because they never really seemed to like each other to begin with. Every line that Colman delivers sounds like a sarcastic attempt at a bon mot, even she’s supposed to be sincere. There’s nothing shocking about either one of their cruel comments to each other. It just feels like two actors doing their thing.
At its heart, The Roses is meant to be a satire. Theo and Ivy grow to hate each other but neither one is willing to give up their rather tacky house. Unfortunately, Jay Roach is exactly the wrong director for this material. Roach has gone from directing broad but genuinely funny comedies to becoming something of a second-rate Adam McKay. Perhaps even more so than McKay, he’s a prime example of what happens when a director decides that he can’t just be happy making movies that people actually enjoy. (Trumbo and Bombshell may have gotten mildly good reviews from critics who are sympathetic to Roach’s liberal politics but, in the end, Austin Powers is the film for which audiences will remember Jay Roach.) There’s not a subtle moment to be found in The Roses and, as a result, there’s not really much genuine emotion to be found either. Towards the end of the film, we get a montage of Theo and Ivy escalating their attacks on one another. It’s one thing for Ivy to create an AI video of Theo smoking crack. It’s another thing for Theo to spike the food at Ivy’s restaurant with hallucinogenic shrooms, leading to an slow motion orgy involving a bunch of middle-aged tourists. It all becomes so cartoonish that the film loses sight of whatever it was trying to say about marriage.
Touted as an Oscar nominee before it was released and subsequently forgotten about, The Roses was one of the many disappointing films of 2025.
Through the Shattered Lens 