Movie Review: The Roses (2025)
I walked in expecting a lighthearted rom-com about an older couple. I walked out with a dark comedy rattling around my soul, leaving me deliciously unsettled. Heavy, yes – but undeniably watchable thanks to Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch, who deliver performances as sharp as the storyline is unforgiving.
Their characters, married couple Ivy and Theo Rose, are drawn with unnerving precision. Colman and Cumberbatch inhabit them so completely that their unraveling feels inevitable, like having a mirror held up to love’s worst moments.
Cumberbatch is a particularly tough sit – bitter, petty, lashing out – yet the script resists easy villainy. We see the roots of his resentment: ideas dismissed, a career in architecture dissolving, a reluctant slide into stay-at-home fatherhood. Colman’s arc, in turn, twists the knife: a woman who longed for domestic calm, forced instead into reluctant breadwinner status while denying the rot beneath her marriage.
In The Roses, the “mirror” is long-term love soured by ambition and resentment. That’s the heart of its dark comedy – finding absurdity in the ugliest corners of intimacy, and daring the audience to laugh even as they wince.
The Roses doesn’t blink. It digs into failure, ambition, resentment, and the toll success exacts on love. The result is less escapism, more couples therapy you didn’t ask for with popcorn. Darkly funny in places, yes, but also uncomfortably recognisable.
As someone trading footloose freedom for the chaos of parenthood and marriage, the film hit a little too close. It pressed down hard on the sore tooth of long-term love – the kind you keep probing even though you know it will sting. A form of torture for the commitment-phobic.
On paper, it’s a five-star film. But the weight it leaves behind is hard to shake, melting the score down to a more honest measure: a mirror held up to long-term love, reflected back as 3½ choctops out of 5.
The Roses (2025)
Director: Jay Roach
Writers: Warren Adler, Tony McNamara
Stars: Olivia Colman, Benedict Cumberbatch, Kate McKinnon, Andy Samburg
Genre: Dark Comedy
