Rosebush Pruning: Why Wuthering Heights Is No Longer This Year's Most Provocative Film

Move over, Cathy and Heathcliff, we've got a new band of controversial characters to dissect and discuss as we move into the second half of 2026.

Should audiences be careful what they wish for? From the moment of its release on Valentine's Day this year, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights sold a lot of tickets on the promise of A-lister debauchery, but many fans left the cinema a little disappointed with the level of spice. Perhaps it was fate, perhaps it was creative programming, but a far more provocative movie was premiering at the Berlin Film Festival that very same night: Rosebush Pruning.

This incendiary movie has now finally arrived in UK theatres, meaning that those same thrill-seeking moviegoers can once again test their nerves — and trust me when I say that nerves will be tested. This is a movie in which Lady Bird’s dad has a very intimate encounter with the current bookie’s favourite to be the next James Bond — a scene that would be spicy enough even if the characters they were playing weren’t father and son. Oh, and the father’s blind. 

Fennell’s movie might have its fair share of moaning and groaning (it's also better, in my opinion), but there’s more provocation in a single petal of Rosebush Pruning than Wuthering can muster in its 136-minute runtime. Whatever you might think of it, it’s without a doubt the most provocative mainstream release in years. Here’s why. 

Who's Involved in Rosebush Pruning?

Rosebush Pruning is the latest from Karim Aïnouz, a Brazilian director who made his name with a string of stylish, queer festival films (like Futuro Beach) before charming the cinematic world with Invisible Life back in 2019: a gorgeous, epic melodrama that was unlucky to miss out on a Best International Film nomination at the 2020 Oscars. For his latest, Aïnouz has decided to zag by working with Efthymis Filippou, a longtime collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos — notably on the Greek filmmaker’s earlier and edgier movies like Dogtooth and Alps. 

Rosebush Pruning is a modern update of Marco Bellocchio’s Fists in the Pockets — a searing debut that tells the story of a young boy with epilepsy who decides to murder his bourgeois family. Interestingly, Pockets was chastised upon release before being reassessed as a metaphor for the fascism that Bellocchio believed still lingered in Italian society in the 1960s. On the face of it, our current climate feels perfectly suited for another film like this, but Rosebush Pruning's provocations are too schlocky and ham-fisted to really hit home.

What Makes Rosebush Pruning So Provocative?

Quite a lot. In Filippou’s script, the action mostly takes place in the hills outside Barcelona, where four siblings (played by Callum Turner, Lukas Gage, Riley Keough, and Jamie Bell) swan about their modernist mansion looking for ways to stave off the boredom. This includes wearing clothes, talking about clothes, making podcasts, dreaming about killing, and incest. 

Aside from all the violence, bodily fluids, obsession with money, problematic longing and various other things that don’t need repeating here, the movie feels like an outright assault on the senses for two key reasons. The first, as hinted above, is the casting. Gage (The White Lotus), Bell (Nymphomaniac) and Keough (The House That Jack Built) aren’t exactly strangers to problematic or risque material, but seeing Callum Turner in the lead and Elle Fanning in a supporting role is jarring to say the least. 

Aside from testing the waters recently as a romantic lead in movies like Eternity and One Night Only (not to mention marrying one of the world's most famous pop stars), Turner looks like a strong contender to be the next James Bond. He's been picking up experimental roles here and there (if you can only watch one rose-based Turner movie this year, you should make it Rose of Nevada) but seeing him getting involved in some of the scenes in Rosebush reminded me more of the recent Riz Ahmed show Bait —in which the actor plays a 007 contender who continually shoots himself in the foot.

In a certain light, the movie could be good fun for the sickos — and at 97 minutes, you can’t say that it overstays its welcome — but beyond the inter-family seductions and garish colours, the most hard to stomach thing is the nihilism at its core. In short, the story lacks a single character worth rooting for or who you even enjoy being around. There's also barely a genuine relationship between any of them, even though Aïnouz seems to want you to believe that Jamie Bell’s Jack is the good egg, and that his relationship with Fanning’s Martha is an attempt to break free of his family’s clutches. 

This made me think that Martha would be a compelling sheep amongst the wolves—the kind of character you begin to worry about — but the film makes no effort to make either of them remotely likeable. And that’s before we even get to their mother — whose casting would be sacrilege to give away here. 

But… Why?

In updating Bellocchio's movie, Aïnouz and Filippou were probably attempting to join a lineage of bad taste movies that reflected their decadent times.

The most notorious of these is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a masterpiece which is still seen as one of the most controversial films ever made. Similar to Bellocchio's film in spirit but on a much larger scale, Salo ended up being Pasolini's haunting final work as the director died in unusual circumstances (conspiracies theories still abound) just days before it was set for release. Michael Haneke's Funny Games similarly comes to mind.

Unfortunately for all the talent involved, Aïnouz and Filippou miss their mark — which kind of adds to how abrasive Rosebush Pruning is, in some ways. The sense of knock-off Lanthimos ultimately robs it of its political sting and leaves the movie looking about as shallow as the protagonist’s daydreams of floating loafers.

This is why the critics have been so unforgiving towards it, and in an age when the critical urge is to hedge your bets about extreme material on the off-chance that it gets reappraised in a few months or years, the lack of people who have rallied behind this one kind of says it all. 

Don't say we didn't warn you.