The Roses (2025) Review: A Better Adaptation

The Roses is a stunning remake that succeeds at reinventing its source material; the two central performances make up for inconsistent humor.

“He has… arms?,” replies his wife Ivy (Olivia Colman, of The Lost Daughter), making it painfully clear that the honeymoon phase has been over for a while for our titular couple. Ivy and Theo’s list of “things they like about each other” quickly turns into a series of insults, until their therapist (Belinda Bromilow) eventually makes her assessment. “I don’t think you have the capacity to fix your problems,” she tells them; soon, we understand just how right she is.

The opening scene of Jay Roach’s (Bombshell) The Roses shows us one of the many ways in which the 2025 adaptation improves upon the original film. If The War of the Roses started with a narrative frame in which director Danny DeVito, who also played the protagonist’s lawyer/friend, narrated the tale to a prospective client, the new adaptation lets its protagonists introduce the story, grabbing our attention from the get-go and focusing our attention on our leads from the very first scene.

Soon, we’re taken back to “where it began,” and treated to a much better meet-cute than what we got in the original film, where Michael Douglas’s Oliver and Kathleen Turner’s Barbara barely had time to meet before they started resenting each other. Instead, The Roses takes its time familiarizing us with Theo and Ivy – and eventually, their children and friends – and getting us to care about the two protagonists’ lives.

It all starts in London; accomplished architect Theo takes a break from a frustrating meeting at a top-end restaurant and finds himself in the kitchen, where Ivy is chopping salmon, stuck in a job that’s definitely below her skill set. “I’m moving to America to become a chef,” she tells him. “Maybe I should come with you,” he says. “We haven’t even had sex yet,” she flirts, giving us a taste of the kind of witty, fast-paced humor we’ll find in this story.

The story of The Roses more or less follows the same plot points as those of the book and 1898 film: a man and a woman have an epic love story that eventually leads them to resenting each other; what follows is a nasty divorce with a fight to the death for who gets to keep the house, in which the two leads become increasingly nastier to one another. But the 2025 movie also makes some major changes that ultimately lead to a more timely and better balanced story that makes it easy to overlook its flaws.

In The War of the Roses, Michael Douglas’s Oliver is a wealthy corporate lawyer who lives in a mansion that his wife, Kathleen Turner’s Barbara, spends many years decorating. In The Roses, Ivy is so much more than the curator of a beautiful house, and her own aspirations and desires play a big part into the shifting dynamics between our protagonists.

At the start of the film, Ivy is a humble cook with small, achievable aims who is happy to put her dreams aside for her husband’s career. Theo, on the other hand, has huge aspirations, and is on the verge of achieving fame: he has been chosen to design a new building for a nautical museum in San Francisco, and he has a clear vision for it. His creation will be shaped like a ship, to “remind us of all that humans can and should be: at our very best”.

But at the opening of the building, a catastrophic storm strikes and causes Theo’s masterpiece to collapse, with our protagonist’s despair inadvertently sparking a meme, to make things even worse. At the same time, Ivy, who now owns her own seafood restaurant – which Theo bought for her as a token of his love – gets her first positive review, and becomes an overnight success. Soon, the aptly named “We’ve Got Crabs” is doing so well that she can afford to open more branches, and just like that, Ivy is a wealthy businesswoman who has employees and gets invited to parties. Theo, on the other hand, is a failed architect with zero job prospects, and who’s so desperate to have a project of his own that he becomes obsessed with turning their two kids into athletes.

Screenwriter Tony McNamara’s (The Favourite, Poor Things) changes from the original film and novel are deliberate, and give us a story that is not only more timely, but where the reasons for our characters to eventually resent each other are more layered and complex.

Here, both protagonists achieve and lose status and wealth, and this role reversal profoundly affects their relationship, adding to a series of behavioural traits that are only exacerbated by the passing of time. And when things take a turn for the worse, there’s no need for the kind of cruelty we see in the 1989 movie, as the buildup is enough to make the stakes higher. As a result, the final moments of the film – which I won’t spoil here – are as entertaining and tense as they should be, with a subtle ending that adds another layer of commentary thanks to some ironically placed props.

And then there’s the home itself, which assumes a much deeper meaning than it did in the previous film. In The Roses, the house where our couple moves has been built and decorated by Theo but paid for by Ivy, who allowed her architect husband to splurge on the most useless items just so he would have a project and stop obsessing about his own failures. This makes the power dynamics at play even more intriguing, as the Roses’ personal and professional lives collide into a mess of emotions that becomes so much more satisfying when it eventually explodes. It also makes the matter of who should keep the house more complex, bringing the idea of legacy into it on top of the commentary on materialism that was already present in the original work.

Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch excel, imbuing their characters with so much personality and charisma to make them likable despite Ivy and Theo’s very noticeable flaws as human beings. When the couple first meets, the chemistry the two stars conjure up within seconds really helps define both characters, and it’s thanks to them that we remain invested in the central relationship even when both Ivy and Theo and the film itself are at their most self-destructive.

Saldy, the humor in The Roses is very hit-or-miss; there are plenty of hysterically funny moments that will have you bursting out loud when you least expect, from the things Ivy and Theo say to each other to various situations in which they find themselves and a certain meme about a “boat going down”. But especially in the second half of the movie, there’s also a lot of endless banter, where The Roses becomes too witty for its own good and the jokes start to get tired.

It doesn’t help that Kate McKinnon and Andy Samberg play Ivy and Theo’s friends Amy and Barry as if they were stuck in an endless SNL sketch. Despite both stars being some of the funniest and most talented comedians around, their presence makes the movie worse due to a series of cringeworthy jokes and weird, sexually charged moments that make no sense in the context of the story. It’s a shame, because with a better script, I’m sure both stars would have delivered more memorable scenes.

On top of this, Ivy and Theo’s jokes often revolve around the idea of suicide, from a “this makes me want to kill myself” kind of line that both characters repeat several times throughout the movie to Ivy even giving herself an allergic reaction more than once so that her husband would rescue her with an Epipen. Despite this clearly being an attempt at foreshadowing, it just becomes very repetitive and unnatural, depriving the characters of some of the authenticity that the first half of the film had helped establish.

In an otherwise very clever and well-balanced script, the combination of poor comedic relief from McKinnon and Samberg’s characters and awkward one-liners from our leads make the humor feel inconsistent, which is a shame giving how well everything else works. Thankfully, Ncuti Gatwa and Sunita Mani are flawless as Ivy’s head waiter and sous chef. They provide plenty of heartwarming, witty moments that, together with the humor that does work in the film, make up for most of these tonal issues. We don’t get much time with Ivy and Theo’s daughter Hattie (Delaney Quinn and Hala Finley) and son Roy (Ollie Robinson and Wells Rappaport), but both characters are a welcome improvement over the previous film too.

Technically speaking, the film is impressive too. The production design (Mark Ricker, of Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom) is so immersive and detailed that it completely draws you into the movie, making you feel like you’re experiencing it all in real time. Most environments become characters of their own, from Ivy and Theo’s house to the “We’ve Got Crabs” restaurant and more places that are familiar from the moment you step into them. The costume design (PC Williams, of Back to Black) is superb too: the characters’ everyday clothes imbue them with personality, and their gorgeous work uniforms make everything feel more real and appealing.

The sound design (Ando Johnson, of Mufasa) helps with the horror-thriller elements of the film, using enhanced noises that alert us of what’s to come from the very first scenes of the movie. The soundtrack provides plenty of emotion and personality, starting from a charming opening credits sequence that I’ll let you discover on your own.

Despite some tonal inconsistencies and awkward humor, The Roses is still a significant improvement over the previous film. The film is far from perfect, as it’s definitely a little too long and the plot isn’t revolutionary; if you’re a fan of the original movie’s darker elements, you’ll find a much more lighthearted tale here that might not fully satisfy you. But if you’d just like to have a good time at the movies, you’ll really enjoy The Roses. With fantastic turns from Colman, Cumberbatch, Gatwa and Mani, many clever changes to the story that add depth and complexity to characters and plot, and impressive technical execution, Jay Roach’s adaptation reinvents the original film and makes it better, delivering a journey worth taking.

The Roses (2025) will be released in Italian cinemas on August 27, 2025 and in U.S. & Canadian theaters, U.K. & Irish cinemas, and globally in theatres on August 29.