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A wickedly funny and tender portrait of love curdling into rivalry that transforms domestic spaces into battlegrounds.

A review by Ioanna Gousiopoulou

Jay Roach’s The Roses (2025) announces itself with the cool confidence of a film that knows exactly why it was made. It isn’t a museum-piece homage or a glib, meme-ready rehash; it’s a contemporary dark comedy with claws, built on Tony McNamara’s immaculate, acid-tipped screenplay and performed with nerve by Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman. You can feel the craft in every scene—the care with which tone is calibrated, the perversely elegant way a domestic squabble flowers into a minor apocalypse—and yet the movie plays as effortless, even buoyant. It’s that rare remake that justifies its bloodline by interrogating it, and then turns the family portrait toward the present.

Although firmly updated for the modern era, The Roses owes its DNA to Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, a wickedly satirical dissection of marriage and divorce. Where Adler’s book (and the 1989 film it inspired) portrayed the Roses’ descent into domestic warfare as a dark fable about greed and vanity, Jay Roach’s reimagining reframes that battle through the lens of contemporary anxieties—career ambition, gender roles, and the economy of success. The connection to the novel is clear in the bones of the story—a couple dismantling each other with escalating cruelty—but the new film expands the thematic scope, making the satire feel less like a period piece and more like a mirror held to today’s shifting dynamics of love and power.

Benedict Cumberbatch’s Theo and Olivia Colman’s Ivy begin as an aspirational portrait—competent, witty, and battle-tested by the marketplace. The first movement of the film is all surface pleasure: fast dialogue served at a champagne fizz, needle drops that flirt with smugness but dissolve in sly charm, and camera blocking that’s almost choreographic as the couple navigates shared spaces with muscle memory and practised grace. Then the balances shift. Theo stumbles at work; Ivy ascends. The film never reduces this reversal to a slogan about gender or ego. Instead, it anatomizes the subtler triumphs and humiliations of partnership: who fetches the wine, who receives the lingering gaze at a dinner party, whose silence counts as support and whose counts as sabotage. The comedy lives in these microtransactions, and the cruelty does too. 

Roach directs with a seasoned comedian’s ear and a dramatist’s patience. He understands that dark comedy is a game of tempo—press, release, press—and he allows scenes to dilate long enough for discomfort to settle before springing the joke. The house is a character and then, increasingly, a thesis: reflective surfaces that multiply the couple into a committee of versions; thresholds that transform from open invitation to checkpoint; a kitchen island that becomes a tribunal bench. The production design is immaculate without being fussy, and it’s pointed: the mise-en-scène keeps inventing props that can be repurposed as trophies or weapons. You never forget that this is a war fought with the tools of intimacy—shared histories, pet names, the exact pressure points of private shame.

What keeps The Roses from smug cynicism is how much human curiosity it brings to both spouses. Cumberbatch is ferociously good at weaponizing self-awareness; he lets us see Theo watching his worst impulses arrive a beat before he commits to them. There’s real pathos in that microsecond of choice, and real hilarity when he chooses badly. He moves with the brittle energy of a man who suspects the party has tipped into an inside joke at his expense. Colman, meanwhile, locates the most interesting version of Ivy: not the cartoon of empowerment that genre convention might tempt, but a woman whose competence has always coexisted with fear of how small she is allowed to be. The brilliance of her performance is that Ivy’s triumphs don’t varnish over that fear; they sharpen it. When she twists the knife, Colman makes sure we feel the wrist tremor beneath the aim.

Ultimately, The Roses has the courage to treat love not as a saintly refuge but as a risky act of mutual authorship. The film’s cruelty is unsparing, but its gaze is compassionate. It refuses to pick a hero because it knows the most honest stories of marriage rarely have one. Instead, it lets us sit with the ugliness people show to the person who knows them best, and then asks if the brief, incandescent moments of grace are still worth the cost. In the final passages, Roach risks sincerity, and it works. The sting doesn’t dissolve; it refracts. You walk out thinking not only about who did what to whom, but about the pressures that made such precision targeting possible—ambition, pride, the terrors of being seen and the terrors of being ignored.

If remakes must exist, let them be like this: not cover versions, but conversations. The Roses argues, with wit and bite, that the domestic battlefield remains the most cinematic terrain we have. It’s a dazzlingly acted, beautifully engineered dark comedy that understands how modern love is negotiated, gamed, and sometimes annihilated, and it leaves a mark that’s both bitter and intoxicating.