Good news, everyone! Hollywood may be entering a new phase of romantic comedies; recently we’ve had Celine Song’s divisive take on privilege and dating in The Materialists, this week we get Jay Roach’s reimagining of Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War of the Roses, and next week we’ll see Dakota Johnson opening up her relationship in Splitsville. None of these films are straight-up romcoms (audiences are no longer content to watch foppish white men fall in love with film stars). New takes require hot-button issues; dating privilege, generational trauma, open relationships. And I’m here for it, provided that Pedro Pascal isn’t in every movie.

So, what fresh provocation does The Roses add to the age-old cautionary tale of married life gone wrong? Australian writer Tony McNamara (whose credits include The Favourite and Poor Things) flips the gender roles; now it’s wife Ivy (Olivia Colman) as the ambitious careerist, and husband Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) as resentful stay-at-home parent. Theo is an aspiring architect whose career comes (literally) crashing down along with his newest prestige building. Unexpectedly, Ivy’s unambitious restaurant (implausibly named “I’ve Got Crabs”) is a huge hit, propelling Ivy to social media fame and fortune.

As the years go on, troubles and resentments creep in. As Theo protests his relegation to stay-at-home dad, Ivy lays the stakes out bare: “Someone has to sacrifice themselves at the altar of the marriage.” But the termites in this union are not what we might expect. Infidelity is not the threatening force in The Roses. In McNamara’s treatment, the real villains of human connection are ego, money, career success and pride.

The Roses is somewhat deceptively being marketed as an ensemble comedy, due to side characters played by Andy Samberg, Kate McKinnon, Sunita Mani, Allison Janney and others. But these extra players – squarely inserted for comic relief – appear sporadically. Really, this is Colman and Cumberbatch’s vehicle, and McNamara’s lively script is full of profanity and glib one-liners that the two English stars are clearly having fun with. Of note is the film’s centrepiece scene, a drunken dinner party that goes wrong in all the right ways and features some of the best putdowns since Succession wrapped in 2023.

And perhaps it’s the pessimism of The Roses that makes it work. Marriage, and its inevitable consequences, is the source of existential pain. Children, possessions, achievements and failures, all become roadblocks that prevent Ivy and Theo from genuine human connection. The film’s final (and admittedly weakest) act shifts gears from the metaphorical to the literal, with Colman and Cumberbatch taking “til death do us part” to its logical conclusion. Like The Menu or Triangle of Sadness before it, the filmmaking is not subtle. But that’s hardly the point. Perhaps in 2025, The Roses is the silly catharsis that we need.

 

The Roses opens today in cinemas.