The Roses (dir. Jay Roach)

by Jack Martin | Aug 30, 2025

Certificate: 15

Running Time: 105 mins

UK Distributor: Searchlight Pictures

UK Release Date: 29 August 2025

WHO’S IN THE ROSES?

Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Allison Janney, Belinda Bromilow, Sunita Mani, Ncuti Gatwa, Jamie Demetriou, Zoë Chao, Hala Finley, Akie Kotabe

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Jay Roach (director, producer), Tony McNamara (writer), Adam Ackland, Tom Carver, Leah Clarke, Michelle Graham and Ed Sinclair (producers), Theodore Shapiro (composer), Florian Hoffmeister (cinematographer), Jon Poll (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A seemingly happy couple (Cumberbatch and Colman) declines rapidly into all-out war with each other…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON THE ROSES?

The appeal of both Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses and the 1989 Danny DeVito-directed adaptation of the same name was how relentless bitter and nasty they were. The story of a marriage crumbling into despair and petty destruction largely avoided sentimentality and focused exclusively on the utter chasm that was growing between the titular couple, which made for unapologetically brutal entertainment on both paper and the screen in the 80s.

In 2025, though, such a story and its rather mean undertones might not resonate as deeply with sensitive audiences, and this new version from director Jay Roach and screenwriter Tony McNamara – simply titled The Roses – more or less proves that this premise may not be as timeless as it might have originally seemed. The bitterness is very much present, as is the nastiness, but it doesn’t translate all that well in today’s era, at least to where you can get plenty of uncomfortable laughs from the rampant hostility of it all.

The Roses of the title are Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch and Ivy (Olivia Colman), a British couple who head out to Northern California shortly after meeting in order to pursue their dreams, him as an architect and her as a chef. Things seem to go well for the couple, at least for Theo whose career is riding high while Ivy is a stay-at-home mother to their kids, but a literal change in the wind reverses their fortunes: Ivy finds her seafood restaurant gaining excellent business, while Theo finds his legacy in tatters and left to whip the kids into shape via rigorous exercising regimes. Needless to say, an unhealthy mixture of jealousy and resentment begins to brew between the two, bubbling away until they can no longer contain their hatred for one another, sparking a fierce war of words that threatens to consume both of them.

Such a war is made even more venomous by the fact that it’s Tony McNamara, a master of undercutting wit, who’s writing such words. The scribe, best known for penning Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite and Poor Things, comes out with some merciless one-liners that the actors aim and fire at one another endlessly, and more often than not they are amusingly brutal in ways that make you feel the emotional pain that they cause, almost as much as the receiving characters. Of course, having actors like Cumberbatch and Colman serve as the central vessels for such stinging dialogue is a massive benefit to The Roses, for they themselves are experts in delivering blackbelt-level passive-aggression with their elegant British charm, and their uneasy chemistry, even when they’re practically at each other’s throats, is palpable enough to believe in their disintegration not just as a couple but as rational people who are capable of thinking and talking like adults.

But it simply isn’t enough to prevent the film from giving audiences a feeling of severe discomfort whilst watching it, and not the kind that it wants you to feel. The film is surprisingly a slow-burn, spending most of its 105-minute runtime showing the gradual erosion of this marriage as they go from content suburbanites to egomaniacal sociopaths who are barely able to be in the same room with each other. In some respects, this is an interesting direction that makes it feel distinct from both the book and the previous adaptation, which more or less began around the point when things started going downhill for this couple, whereas this takes more time examining what led to the titular war of the Roses.

However, the film runs into a small but very significant problem: it’s not very funny. While McNamara’s writing is certainly sharp with its dry quips that Cumberbatch and Colman deliver with devilish glee, Roach’s direction isn’t able to match their black-hearted ferocity, as it’s got too much of a glossy look to it and often emphasises sitcom humour over the more sophisticated sparring suggested in the script and performances. Instead, the film appears to fancy itself a more streamlined comedy akin to Roach’s own Meet the Parents, complete with too many supporting characters showing up to serve no other purpose than to try and be funny, like Kate McKinnon being weirdly horny around Cumberbatch, and Ncuti Gatwa who sadly gets nothing substantial to do and, like many others, could easily have been cut out of the story entirely. As a result, it’s much more awkward and even difficult to sit through scenes of this couple shouting all these insults at each other, because it feels like you’re watching two people you’re not overly keen on arguing in front of their guests, and there’s not enough humour elsewhere to latch onto for safety.

This contrast between the lighter filmmaking and the darker script doesn’t really work, because the source material is inherently a pitch-black comedy where people continuously do horrible things to one another until it takes a grim turn, an assignment that DeVito’s film from nearly forty years ago understood to its core. In trying to make it fit neatly within today’s more sensitive society, The Roses comes off as a much safer and more defanged version for those whose level of offence is someone dropping the C-word once in a while.

It’s a shame, because you can really feel some of the passion in McNamara’s script and especially the two central performances, but this take on the story is ultimately too afraid to embrace its darker roots and give the audience a war that’s worth fighting for.

SO, TO SUM UP…

The Roses is an all-too safe rendition of the classic black-comedy The War of the Roses that, despite some solid quips by writer Tony McNamara that are gleefully delivered by the fun duo of Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman, is marred by more streamlined filmmaking that simply doesn’t match the darker material.