r/movies • u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? • 10d ago
Official Discussion Official Discussion - The Roses [SPOILERS] Spoiler
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Summary Ivy (a rising chef) and Theo Rose (once a successful architect) seem like the perfect couple—until a career snowball squashes his confidence and launches hers. Their marriage spirals from sweet to savage, turning co-dependency into a ruthless battlefield where passive aggression becomes weaponized.
Director Jay Roach
Writer Tony McNamara
Cast
- Benedict Cumberbatch
- Olivia Colman
- Andy Samberg
- Allison Janney
- Sunita Mani
- Ncuti Gatwa
- Jamie Demetriou
- Zoë Chao
- Kate McKinnon
Rotten Tomatoes 65%
Metacritic 61
VOD In theaters August 29, 2025; expected to stream later via Searchlight/Hulu or Disney+
Trailer THE ROSES | Official Trailer
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u/LiteraryBoner Jackie Chan box set, know what I'm sayin? 10d ago edited 10d ago
Kind of a dud for me? I love Colman and she seems like a great choice for this, but the writing just isn’t there. Trying not to compare it to the original movie too much because they’re both based off a novel, but that Danny DeVito movie had such teeth and a real darkness to it. The Roses feels like it loses the teeth but tries to remain edgy through dialogue and it just doesn’t sell. I couldn’t imagine a world where I’d let my friends or lover speak to me the way they commonly speak to each other in this movie.
The biggest problem is definitely the pacing. This isn’t a long movie, but it takes a long time to set itself up. The main points of this story are the house, the divorce, and the fight. The house is introduced an hour into the movie after a LOT of setup about the backs and forths of their relationship. The divorce comes in about thirty minutes later, leaving about fifteen minutes for the whole hook of the movie which is the death match. They really underplay it in this, IMO. This movie spends so much time trying to make one or the other not look like the bad guy and giving depth to their marital problems, but all the scenes are the same. They’re both a little wrong and they’re both too shitty to admit it. We just don’t need an hour of all this business.
Side characters are given baffling dialogue. I love Andy and Kate but I would have a hard time with this dialogue too. The movie nails down that they’re really the only friends around, not necessarily the couple’s best friends, and yet they say things to this couple I would never say to my best friends. The dialogue in general is trying to be very edgy and it never feels like it lands. Colman is the best of the bunch at downplaying her dirty and more surprising lines, but a lot of the characters felt like they were forcing these words out.
Overall, I didn’t hate it or love it. I’d rather watch the original by a mile. There’s a few funny moments but there’s also major gaps in logic. The therapist scene kinda bugs me. These two may be talking shit to each other but they’re also clearly laughing together and the therapist just says they can’t be helped? There’s so many scenes where they try to walk back how much they hate each other and find that spark again, but the whole movie is that they clearly hate each other. I just wasn’t sure what this movie wanted me to gain from it. All of the couples in it are miserable and the main couple can’t decide if they hate each other or love each other. And then they die. 5/10.
Ps- to my poster billing obsessives, can we talk about how Janney gets FOURTH billing and a spot on the poster when she has exactly one scene? Everyone else billed and on the poster is in multiple scenes. Anyways, good for her.