'The Roses' Review: Just A Couple Matching Each Other’s Freak

Everyone wants someone who is a match for their freak — until they actually find one. That’s The Roses in a nutshell: just a couple matching each other’s freak, until the freak becomes too much to handle and suddenly the wine glasses are flying, the kitchen island is collateral damage, and you’re left wondering if marriage is really just an extreme sport no one asked to sign up for.

Jay Roach’s new adaptation of Warren Adler’s The War of the Roses (yes, the one that gave us Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner trying to obliterate each other in 1989) is glossier, wittier, and very Gen Z Internet–friendly in its packaging. Think: sweeping coastal mansions you want to screenshot for your “manifest board,” Olivia Colman in earrings that deserve their own tag, and Benedict Cumberbatch brooding like a man who knows he’s being outpaced by his own wife’s PR team. It’s not quite war; it’s marital sparring filmed like an ELLE Decor tour.

The setup is promising. Theo (Cumberbatch), a starchitect whose dreams literally collapse in a storm, finds himself playing househusband while Ivy (Colman), the once-underappreciated chef, turns her little seaside restaurant into a foodie empire.

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At first, it’s a romcom glow-up: he supports her, she roots for him, they’re both narcissists but in a charming way that makes their friends (played with wasted potential by Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon) nod along at dinner parties. Then ambition curdles into resentment, and suddenly their matching freak turns toxic. 

Here’s where the Gen Z perspective lands: to us, watching The Roses feels like peeking at millennial marriage under a microscope. It’s career vs. family, ambition vs. compromise, the eternal debate of “who sacrificed more?”—all themes that sound like boomer Facebook fights but here are dressed in Colman’s sardonic wit and Cumberbatch’s exquisitely furrowed brow. It’s like seeing your older siblings spiral while you’re still swiping on Hinge and thinking, 'Wow, this is why we’re keeping situationships casual.' The film aims to be a cautionary tale, but it also inadvertently reads like a cringeworthy slang 'be delulu, it’s the solulu' montage that went way off script.

For about 75 minutes, it works. The banter is razor-sharp, their chemistry feels lived-in, and the cinematography flatters everything — California sunsets, candlelit kitchens, even Colman’s side-eye. You start believing this is Marriage Story with a sharper manicure. But then Roach seems to panic that we signed up for a 'war' and force-feeds us a third act of over-the-top marital combat. It’s meant to be black comedy, but it plays more like a Pinterest board imploding in slow motion.

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Where the ’89 film leaned into savage cartoon violence, this one is too polished, too reasonable. Theo and Ivy don’t feel like people who’d kill each other over a mansion; they feel like people who’d cry over therapy bills and sign divorce papers on a Peloton.

And yet, the leads save it. Colman is magnetic, layering Ivy’s climb with both grit and glamour, and Cumberbatch turns Theo’s insecurity into something almost sympathetic. Together, they prove that even when love decays, charisma can still bloom. The supporting cast, from Zoë Chao to Alison Janney (a scene-stealing divorce lawyer with the aura of a couture Rottweiler), adds flavour, but the film never lets them bite as hard as they should.

Barry, Theo’s mate, is played with Samberg’s signature golden-retriever energy — always cracking a joke at the wrong time, like comic relief wearing the wrong shoes to a black-tie party. He’s funny, sure, but compared to the Cumberbatch–Colman duel, he feels like a warm-up act who never got the memo. Ncuti Gatwa as Ivy’s waiter radiates that effervescent energy only he can, half gossip, half hype man, all charisma. He doesn’t get nearly enough screen time, but every eyebrow raise is a meme waiting to happen.

Ultimately, The Roses is less a war than a spat in chaos. It’s pretty, witty, sometimes cutting, but rarely bruising. Gen Z will view it as proof that millennial marriages are merely highly aesthetic battlegrounds, dressed up with design-forward kitchens and passive-aggressive banter. Millennials, meanwhile, might quietly wince and whisper: 'too real'.

Final verdict: Come for Colman’s earrings and Cumberbatch’s brooding, stay for the interiors, but don’t expect bloodshed. This is divorce cinema with a blow-dry, a chic veneer over heartbreak. A movie about the mess of marriage that looks almost too tidy, like a fight filmed for Instagram Stories with the Paris filter on.

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