‘The Roses’ review: Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman clash as a fracturing married couple | Reviews

Dir: Jay Roach. US. 2025. 106mins 

A once-happy married couple implodes in The Roses, a comedy-drama that is only intermittently successful at approximating the maddening highs and lows of a long-term relationship. Based on Warren Adler’s 1981 novel The War Of The Roses, which also inspired the 1989 dark comedy starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, director Jay Roach’s adaptation proves too broad and tonally erratic. In the process, he undermines game work from Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a husband and wife who can still sometimes see past their animosity to remember the love that once seemed indomitable.

The film works best at demonstrating how anger and affection can coexist in a marriage

The Roses opens August 29 in the UK and US, and its stars should help attract date-night arthouse crowds. Familiarity with the much more biting 1989 hit, directed by Danny DeVito, could also help the new film’s theatrical chances. But mixed reviews may curtail enthusiasm during a traditionally slower time at the multiplex.

Architect Theo (Cumberbatch) and chef Ivy Rose (Colman) have been married for 10 years, long ago leaving the UK behind to raise twins in sunny, idyllic Northern California. His career has flourished, while she has mostly cared for the children — that is, until he encourages her to open her own restaurant and follow her passions. One fateful night, a terrible storm obliterates an ostentatious new museum he has designed, leading to his professional ruin, while a group of motorists take shelter from the torrential rains at her floundering restaurant — including an influential food critic who gives her a glowing review. In that moment, Ivy becomes a sensation, setting in motion her burgeoning culinary empire.

This adaptation is written by Tony McNamara, who previously co-wrote The Favourite, which won Colman an Oscar and a Bafta, and the story’s shift in fortunes for both Theo and Ivy creates potentially rich narrative possibilities. Suddenly unemployable, Theo is determined to be a supportive, modern husband — giving up on his dreams to support his wife’s — but The Roses soon reveals how fragile his ego is once his former architecture peers start to shine. (Adding to his humiliation, a video of the museum’s collapse has gone viral.) The more that Ivy becomes seduced by the trappings of celebrity, the more Theo obsesses over turning their children Hattie (Hala Finley) and Roy (Wells Rappaport) into top-flight runners, bent on proving himself to be the “better,” more invested parent. 

The film works best at demonstrating how anger and affection can coexist in a marriage, especially for a couple who were blissfully happy for years. During a memorable scene, Theo and Ivy glumly attend a therapy session, each of them failing to come up with 10 positive traits in their partner, finally bursting into laughter at their shared annoyance at the exercise. Cumberbatch and Colman adroitly navigate their characters’ conflicted feelings, but once Ivy’s restaurant chain takes off, it doesn’t just discombobulate their relationship but also the film. Complicated, flawed individuals make for fascinating love stories, but The Roses strands us with a couple who behave frustratingly inconsistently. Despite the stars’ warm rapport, the Roses are cartoonish ciphers — Theo the wounded alpha male, Ivy the fame-driven careerist — whose marital issues are grossly simplified.

Roach, directing his first feature since 2019’s Bombshell, helmed the blockbuster Austin Powers and Meet The Parents franchises, but The Roses requires a more sophisticated, humanist style of comedy that is beyond his grasp. The humour tends toward the jokey, with Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon particularly wasted as Theo and Ivy’s married friends who have their own problems, which are portrayed in sitcom-y ways. Where DeVito’s 1989 film could be brutally funny in its depiction of how Reagan-era materialism destroyed a status-seeking couple, The Roses is toothless in its dissection of wealth. As a result, Theo and Ivy come across as a well-to-do pair whose champagne problems seem terribly shallow.

This, of course, is the opposite of Roach’s intention, which is to ponder how two besotted individuals can, despite their best intentions, lose connection to one another because of work, children and life’s daily grind. The Roses is only ever gently funny, with its comedic set pieces badly strained. (A sequence involving the shocked Roses attempting to acclimate to their American friends’ ironic love of guns is a low point.) And when the film reaches for greater drama in its second half, flirting with dark emotional terrain, Roach and his cast stumble because they’ve never fully established the critical components that made Theo and Ivy such a compatible duo in the first place. By the time the Roses finally consider calling it quits, audiences may be well ahead of them in thinking it’s for the best.