A British couple living in America find themselves at violent loggerheads when one career plummets while the other goes stratospheric.
As a long-married couple look to be approaching the end of the marital road, neither will budge enough for them both to move on. Will they blow up their marriage or will it be til death do us part? Or perhaps both?
The Roses is based on Warren Adler’s book The War of the Roses, which was previously made into the 1989 movie of the same name. Like many marriages The Roses has moments of hilarity interspersed with stretches of tedium, and like many wars is occasionally exciting interspersed with stretches of tedium. And while the movie will be a gleeful tonic for anyone stuck in a dying relationship, it rolls out like a series of vignettes starring British National Treasure Olivia Colman and Great British Thespian Benedict Cumberbatch (a GBT is one step down from a BNT but don’t worry BC, it won’t be long now.)
The gags are great, especially if you believe that the best marriages are based on a mutual spark of hatred. But alas the film never really takes flight, soaring spectacularly then limping back to hover just above ground level, partly because, for most of it, while it is peppered with great one liners it isn’t frenetic enough.
Ivy (Colman) and Theo (Cumberbatch) meet when Theo takes refuge in Ivy’s restaurant kitchen in London, almost instantly moving to the US for Ivy’s career. Fast forward a few years and she has given up paid work and confines her culinary creativity to making cake versions of historic British landmarks for their two sugar-obsessed children. Theo is climbing the greasy pole as an architect and risking local wrath with what he hopes will be a career-defining maritime museum, complete with a carved sail on the roof.
It is indeed career-defining, as one stormy night it crashes down, and with it his career and ego. Fired from his job, he has to watch while Ivy’s empty seafood restaurant (“We’ve Got Crabs”) suddenly takes off, thanks to a visit from a top restaurant critic that same stormy night. Truly it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.
Soon Theo is both exhausted and frustrated with tidying toys, cooking and endlessly clearing up (I see you, Theo!), and emasculated by Ivy’s massive and very public success. So Theo – always critical of Ivy’s mothering – decides to improve their tweenage twins’ fitness and diet. Everyone in the family is changing into people the others don’t recognise, except Theo, which I suppose tells you something about how much control he has really relinquished.
Despite the bubbling discontent, their regular marriage-threatening eruptions are, up until nearly The End, always capped off when the two of them realise they may both be awful but they also still love each other.
That can’t last for ever though, and as the years roll on the barbs move from brittle to brutal, though like many witty ‘n’ wordy Brits they are shocked to discover that the insults they thought were scaffolding their relationship were actually boring holes in it, weakening them more every day.
When divorce finally arrives, he only wants the hideous, overly designed house he’s built them. She can’t forgive him for “taking” the kids so won’t budge on the house.
Colman and Cumberbatch are, at the Roses’ times of crisis, a hoot but their friends are underused. It’s a shame as the two couples (Amy and Barry / Sally and Rory) are there to show how imperfect marriages can limp on in reasonable harmony if both parties want it, and that the vicious energy coursing round many a long relationship can be harnessed.
Amy (Kate McKinnon) and Barry (Andy Samberg) may have an uneven, bumpy relationship, but while they sail close to the wind they still endure. And props to McKinnon for her ability to remain just (just!) on the right side of hilarious vs unbelievably annoying, a hard one to pull off.
I’d have liked more of fellow architect Rory (Jamie Demetriou), who early on eviscerates Theo’s beliefs (and it’s interesting to see how badly Theo takes criticism from anyone not his wife). Rory’s wife Sally ( Zoë Chao) gifts their marriage a new burst of vicious energy after watching the unpleasant Roses, though not being British they don’t really know how to direct it.
The 1989 movie starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner and Danny DeVito became a classic, but while this 2025 remake is diverting enough I don’t see it being particularly remembered. Colman and Cumberbatch make their dialogue sound entirely believable as they fire off another poison-tipped arrow, and look to be having a ball, but they don’t convince as a married couple. Still because of the subject matter we’ll never know if they lack chemistry or are simply really good at pretending to have been married for 15 years (albeit the last third of the film being what people want to do to each other in their most vicious thoughts rather than actually act upon).
I am though firmly Team Ivy, as she hasn’t done anything wrong (well until she sends an AI video of Theo smoking crack to all his freelance clients. That was naughty.) She’s already put her career on hold for him, then once he deems himself ready to go back to work he expects her to return to being the stay at home mum.
And I think the writer (Tony McNamara) actually agrees with me here, accepting that it is Theo who needs a society-approved redemption rather than Ivy – having him quite literally save a whale.
Missed anything? Check out my article about the ending of The Roses.
Watch The Roses official trailer: