A softer shade of dark
There is a point where a marital comedy wants to move past snark and step into true darkness. The Roses keeps tiptoeing up to that line and then backs away with a quick smile. It is pitched as a savage breakup story, the kind that leaves claw marks on everyone and maybe on the audience too. Yet you can feel director Jay Roach looking over our shoulders, checking if we are still having a good time, and turning up the charm whenever things threaten to grow genuinely mean. The film wants the kicks and bruises of a dark comedy without the deep cuts. It settles for safe. It plays nasty and then reassures itself. It is entertaining in fits. It is not fearless.
That small but crucial pullback becomes a larger problem once you remember what original material we are talking about. Warren Adler wrote The War of the Roses. Danny DeVito made a film from it in the late eighties that still stings. That earlier picture was a razor wire contraption of a movie. Every character got sliced. The ending was spectacular and ghastly and also felt inevitable. This new version is not a direct remake. It is another attempt at the story. It is also gentler, and not in a way that makes it deeper. To be fair, it is probably unwise to keep DeVito’s version in the front of your mind while watching. There is no real win in playing direct comparison games. Still, this new film invites the match up by tackling the same book and the same core idea, and it does not come out on top. It has charm. It does not have the courage of its own meanness.
Here is the surprise though. The reason the movie keeps softening is not only about fear of darkness. It is also about chemistry. The leads are so sparkly with each other that the entire premise starts to wobble. You watch Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman joking and smoldering and you think, these two would kill a therapist with flirting. They would argue and then pull each other into the same room ten minutes later. The whole marriage gone to ash idea becomes harder to buy because the actors keep making the characters look magnetic together. The movie cheats against itself without even trying.
The meet cute that actually works
The opening chapters are wonderful. Theo Rose, a gifted architect, slinks away from a business dinner after learning that the one part of a project he really cared about has been chopped. He wanders into the kitchen of the restaurant to hide his disappointment. Ivy Rose is there, sleeves rolled, ruling the place. They talk. They spar. They laugh. It is one of those meet moments that most films tell you to accept on faith. Here, you believe it. Colman eyes Cumberbatch with hunger and curiosity and a little mischief. He looks back as if he has just found the person he did not know he was looking for. The looks do half the work. The timing does the rest. It is thrilling to see a love at first sight scene that clicks instead of clangs.
From career highs to personal lows
The film is careful about setting the stage for the battle ahead. Theo and Ivy marry and build a life. In the early stretch, he is the one bringing home the paycheck. She stays with the children, runs the household, and channels her talent into elaborate desserts that are half affection and half art project. One cake is a tiny edible model of a nautical center that Theo designed. It is about to open, the first big showpiece of his career. Then a catastrophe hits. His professional triumph turns into a public embarrassment so shocking that it knocks him off the board entirely. At the same time, he gifts Ivy a seafood place to honor everything she put aside for him. She calls it We have got Crabs, which is both a joke and a dare. The place takes off. It takes off in part because his fall makes her story feel even more triumphant. She rides the wave while he gulps sea water.
Three years later
By the time we skip forward a few years, their lives have flipped. Theo is a stay at home dad with a schedule built around training, discipline, and routine. He runs the house with studied focus. Their son and daughter, played by Wells Rappaport and Hala Finley, have settled into a family rhythm where Dad is the default parent. Ivy is now a star chef. Magazines want her. Legendary cooks nod when she enters a room. The single restaurant has become a chain called You have got Crabs. Success tastes salty and sweet. It also tastes different at home.
Theo tries to be proud of her and mostly manages it, but there is a charge of resentment and thwarted ambition in him that will not go away. He feels what she felt when roles were reversed. Isolation. Diminishing. A sense that the world is happening elsewhere. Ivy senses all of this and grows prickly. She feels unappreciated in her own house. She suspects he resents her. It is not only a suspicion. He does, a little. The movie captures a dynamic that is as old as the kitchen table. Two careers, two egos, one family, and not enough oxygen to go around.
There is a mean little twist in the middle. When he was the visible achiever, Ivy did not demand constant gratitude. She kept things afloat. Theo cannot resist asking for credit. Over and over. He needs validation the way a runner needs water. On the other side, Ivy does not want to accept an obvious truth. If one parent is always gone, the kids lean toward the one who stays. She experiences that bonding as theft. She accuses Theo of taking what was hers. The moment is raw and embarrassing because it feels both unfair and honest, which is a real pattern in families when success comes to one person and the house crowns another.
The house becomes the battlefield
Soon the jokes are sharp enough to draw blood and the standoffs stack up. The marriage starts to split. Lawyers hover. Things get ugly. As in the book and the earlier film, the main prize is a house. It is not just any house. It is a dream with walls. A seaside palace that Ivy paid for. She trusted Theo to design it however he liked, which he did with extravagance. He scattered money as if it grew under the floorboards. Irish moss on the rooftops. A dining table from a Spanish monastery that sat through five centuries of prayers. He wanted to mark the place as something you could not find anywhere else. He succeeded. He also salted the earth for any practical solution. This is a house you do not split, a home that feels like a possession in the way that people feel like possessions in bitter divorces. No wonder the fight turns vicious.
The duo at the center
The casting is so good that it almost becomes a problem for the story. Olivia Colman might be the most complete screen actor working in English right now. She can spin a scene from adoration to contempt and back before the camera blinks. She is a pleasure to watch even when the material is uneven. Benedict Cumberbatch is known for chilly genius and stormy loners, but he is a better romantic comedian than his resume suggests. It is a delight to see him use speed and silence and sudden flashes of charm. Together they can be acerbic, brainy, smug, and lusty. They make a meal out of mutual attraction and mutual offense. When the film lets them circle each other, it sings. When it tries to convince us that they are unfixable, it falters, because the spark in the middle is stubborn.
The words that cut
Tony McNamara wrote the script, and you can hear the pen that wrote The Favourite and Poor Things. He has an ear for barbed sentences dressed like compliments. He loves a glossy monologue where a person dissects a feeling as if the emotion were on a lab slide. The dialogue is spiced with phrases that sound inherited from therapy sessions and self help books. It can be funny and also oddly tender. Even the insults are so observant that you feel seen and skewered at once. In one quick burst, Theo answers a loaded question from Ivy by labeling the trap the question is setting. He is naming the shape of the argument as if that will protect him from the sting. It does not.
At their best, the lines crackle. At other times, the writing is a bit too pleased with its own cleverness. You can hear the gears turning. Still, there is something satisfying about a picture that allows two smart people to fight without turning either of them into a fool. The movie respects their intelligence. It has less appetite for their cruelty.
Flat visuals and on the nose music
Jay Roach is a director who knows how to stage a stylish gag. The early Austin Powers adventures were flamboyant valentines to pop nonsense, full of visual jokes and color. Here, the eye candy is rationed. The camera mostly sits back and lets the dialogue carry the load. The choices favor clarity over punch. You get a steady stream of information and a very modest sense of scale. At times you feel like you are watching the opening chapter of a high end premium cable series rather than a film that wants to grab the big screen and shake it. The seaside house is lovely but somehow not fully cinematic on its own terms. It looks like a place a streaming show would use for a ten episode arc.
The soundtrack does not help. The needle drops are obvious. The most glaring is Love Hurts sliding over a sequence where the marriage hits free fall. It is a tune that has been used and used again because the title says everything. The joke wears thin. Imagine a montage of sailboats moving past the horizon while someone cranks up Come Sail Away. That is the level of on the nose we get. It pulls you out of the moment instead of pushing you deeper into it.
Friends who do not quite fit
Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon show up as the couple’s closest friends. In theory, this pair should add fizz and a second lens on the marriage. In practice, their impact fades as the story runs. Samberg does low key exasperation and often seems mostly annoyed by all the drama. That can be funny in a scene or two, but it starts to feel thin. McKinnon plays a gleeful agent of chaos. Her deadpan is pristine. Her libido is part of the joke. She works at a broader pitch than the leads, and the clash becomes distracting. The tone of her scenes belongs to sketch comedy. Colman and Cumberbatch are working in a more human space, even when they are throwing darts. The energies fight.
There is one area where this mismatch pays off. McKinnon’s anything for a laugh antics set up a few priceless reaction shots from Cumberbatch. He plays confusion as if he is standing in front of an alien life form that is vibrating and trying to mate with the drywall. The bewilderment is perfectly timed and very dry. You will laugh even as you wish the film brought the ensemble together with more care.
Therapy as foreplay
The story opens in the middle of things. Theo and Ivy sit in a counseling room. They are asked to make lists of what they appreciate about each other. They try. The compliments are thin and grudging and funny. Within minutes the niceties drop away. The remarks sharpen, then cut, then gash. Just when the counselor is leaning toward the phone to call security, the two of them laugh. They enjoy how wicked their tongues can be. They also enjoy how much the other one can take. You can see it in their eyes. This is flirting for them, and they are excellent at it.
That early sequence plants the seed of the problem that grows and grows. The movie wants us to accept that there is something so broken here that even a good therapist could not help. Yet the chemistry in the room says otherwise. A few sessions, some real compromises, a plan for sharing home life with career, and you start to imagine a path forward. The movie half acknowledges this by making the therapy moments funny and warm, which oddly softens the ground for the blowups later on. You can feel the filmmakers pulling in two directions. They want the roses to wither. They also want us to keep liking the people holding the stems. It is a tricky balance. The film does not solve it.
The house as mirror
One thing the film understands very well is how a home can become a symbol so heavy that people forget what it stands for. That ocean side palace turns into a scoreboard, a trophy shelf, a prize that proves who gave more and who sacrificed more. Theo poured his identity into the architecture. Ivy poured her money and her sense of fairness into the deed. Neither can imagine walking away without losing face. The arguments about beams and tables and roof moss are not really about beams and tables and roof moss. They are about who mattered when, and who mattered more, and who mattered enough. That part cuts close to bone.
What darkness demands
A real dark comedy about a crumbling marriage asks the audience to accept that love can turn to venom and keep going. It requires cruelty without a parachute. This film peeks over the cliff. It pulls us back to safety. You can almost feel the dial marked likability being turned with a worried hand when a scene threatens to push too hard. The screenplay lets characters apologize. The camera gives them gentle closeups when we need to be jolted. The score nudges. There is a sense of empathy at work, which is not a bad thing in life. It is rough on this kind of story.
That final scene
No spoilers here, but it is worth saying that the ending lands. It is bold. It is clean. It sticks the turn it chooses. The trouble is that the ending belongs to a harsher and more committed film than the one we just watched. It feels perfectly designed for a couple whose story has scorched away the last of the tenderness. The couple we have come to know still have embers. They still spark when they are in the same room. The resolution feels like a message from a parallel version of the movie that never talked itself out of risk.
What works
– The central performances. Colman and Cumberbatch find layers even in moments that could play as pure bit. They make attraction and animosity feel like parts of the same current.
– The language. McNamara’s lines snap. The sessions of carefully worded flaying are wicked fun.
– The early romance. The first meeting is credible and charming, which is rare.
– The concept of the house as battleground. Physical space as emotional scorecard is right on the mark.
What falters
– The tone. The film teases darkness but does not stay there. It comforts itself too fast.
– The visual approach. A story this charged could use composition that bites. Instead we get safe framing and gentle flow.
– The music cues. Too obvious, which turns scenes into quotes of other films rather than their own statements.
– The friends subplot. The styles do not blend, and the scenes add motion without momentum.
A small personal note
There were moments during the counseling scenes where I thought, these two could make it. They know how to fight. They know how to make up. They even know how to laugh at the abyss. That may be why I kept falling out of the later sequences. The film kept telling me to let go of the hope it had itself planted. Maybe that is my problem and not the film’s. Still, it lingered.
Verdict
The Roses is an entertaining, sometimes sharp, often funny look at a marriage that bends until it snaps. It has two lead actors who are wonderful together and also a little too wonderful for the thesis it is trying to prove. It is written with bite, even if the bite is not always deep. It is directed with caution where audacity would have suited the material. More than once it feels like a pilot for a high profile series about the same couple, a version that would take time to explore the detours and the repairs, rather than a feature that spikes the ball.
If you want the cold thrill of a true dark comedy, this picture will leave you wanting. If you want to watch two stars play love and war with a lot of charm and a decent amount of sting, you will find reasons to smile. The ending, though, will remind you of the movie this could have been if it had stopped worrying about whether we would still like its leads afterward. Sometimes the bravest move is to let people become irredeemable on screen and then ask us to keep looking. This film glances away. It is good company while it lasts. It is not the wound it thinks it is.
