The Roses (2025)

Jay Roach's The Roses takes Warren Adler's 1981 novel, and the 1989 film it spawned, and moves the furniture around. Benedict Cumberbatch is Theo, an architect whose naval history museum collapses in a storm, and Olivia Colman is Ivy, a chef whose restaurant fills with refugees from the same weather. One career sinks, another rises, and the marriage becomes a negotiation over which spouse gets to be the interesting one. This is a domestic war picture with good china.

The supporting ensemble is diverse in the manner of a well-cast London production. Ncuti Gatwa, Sunita Mani, Zoë Chao and Belinda Bromilow occupy conventional roles, and nobody remarks on it, which is either progress or simply competent casting. The film has no interest in identity as a subject. Race never enters the room. Neither does queerness, nor climate, nor the body, nor the mind. The whale on the beach is a whale, not a metaphor with a policy attached to it.

Where the film brushes against contemporary sensibilities, it does so lightly. The premise inverts the usual arrangement: Ivy earns, Theo parents, and the screenplay treats this as a symptom of marital rot instead of a thesis to be defended. Franchising and the couple's escalating materialism take a few soft punches, though the film holds no structural quarrel with wealth. It ends in fire, as these things do. Roach aims his barbs at two people who cannot stand each other, and he never turns to address the audience. We watch the wreckage, mildly entertained, and carry nothing home but the smoke.