– BERLINALE 2026: Karim Aïnouz’s wild remake of Marco Bellocchio’s classic Fists in the Pocket is a star-studded, absurdist parable of violence inside the family
Callum Turner in Rosebush Pruning
Inspired by Marco Bellocchio’s classic 1965 debut, Fists in the Pocket, Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz’s Rosebush Pruning [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is his second entry in the Berlinale competition after 2014’s Futuro Beach [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. Penned by Yorgos Lanthimos regular Efthimis Filippou, the screenplay replaces Bellocchio’s class rebelliousness with almost absolute absurdity, befitting the director’s bold style – and our era.
The original film’s Italian bourgeois family is replaced by a super-rich US counterpart that has moved to the Catalonian coast, and its blind matriarch by the blind Father (an inspired Tracy Letts). Here we have a narrator: the middle brother, Edward (an exuberantly playful Callum Turner), tells us straight up that they are all vapid egocentrics who care about nothing except music and fashion. All except the eldest brother, Jack (a remarkable Jamie Bell), whom Ed says is different and in whom we actually register signs of humanness as he falls for amateur guitarist Martha (Elle Fanning, in the film’s only psychologically nuanced role) and wants to move away with her. The youngest brother, Robert (Lukas Gage, from The White Lotus, an inescapable reference), is an epileptic, a stand-in for Bellocchio’s anti-hero Alessandro but more sidelined in this version. Finally, there is sister Anna, who appears to be the most detached one in Riley Keough’s appropriately robotic performance, and a story of Mother (Pamela Anderson, clearly enjoying her acting renaissance) having been devoured by a pack of wolves.
While Bellocchio’s family was transgressive for its incestuousness, Aïnouz’s incarnation has to more than bridge the 60-year gap to address the shifts in culture and society that have taken place over that time. Leave it to Filippou to crank it up to 11, with the least irreverent scene involving a semen-filled sock left by one sibling to another to smell. Rivers of blood, sperm and even toothpaste flow in a series of very uncomfortably funny scenes, but the most cringe-inducing one is when Jake brings Martha over for lunch, and Father asks Anna to describe her physical appearance. This is where we glimpse the eldest brother’s vague sense for another person’s feelings, but also where his girlfriend seems to learn how things function around here.
The title of the film comes from one of Ed’s made-up sayings: that a family is like a rosebush that needs pruning, and boy does this one get pruned. The viewer’s involvement is limited by the weirdness of the characters’ behaviour, so much so that it is difficult to perceive them as actual people, but this is not what the filmmakers were aiming for. Instead, this is an absurdist parable on the disconnect of the super-rich from the real world and, more importantly, on violence within a family superficially covered up by what passes for closeness in a completely emotionless void.
Working with his regular DoP, Hélène Louvart, on what looks like luscious 35 mm, Aïnouz creates another visually captivating picture with eye-popping colours and a meticulous mise-en-scène. Composer Matthew Herbert’s bombastic score is super-loud in the mix, fitting the outlandish vibe as much as the garish production design by Rodrigo Martirena. This additionally makes the film more distanced from the viewer than Bellocchio’s quieter original (especially if seen today), but even such ramped-up artificiality and absurdity are much less transgressive in 2026 – an inevitable ceiling that such experienced filmmakers as Aïnouz and Filippou must have known they would hit.
Rosebush Pruning is a co-production between Germany’s The Match Factory (which also has the international sales rights), Italy’s Kavac Film and The Apartment, Spain’s Sur Film and Rosebushpruning, and the UK’s Crybaby.
