‘The Roses’ Movie Review: Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman Make Marital Warfare a Delicious Spectacle

The Myth of Sisyphus is often invoked to describe the relentless drudgery of existence — the image of a man condemned to push a boulder uphill only to watch it tumble back down, again and again. Albert Camus argued that we must imagine Sisyphus happy, finding solace not in reaching the top but in the absurd repetition itself. Marriage, Jay Roach’s The Roses wickedly suggests, can feel just as Sisyphean: a daily climb, a daily collapse, and a peculiar joy in the struggle. Especially when it’s Theo and Ivy’s marriage, which rolls downhill in spectacular, splintering style.

Based on Warren Adler’s The War of the Roses and adapted by Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things), Roach’s film recasts marital warfare as a darkly funny duel between an architect and a chef. Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Ivy (Olivia Colman) meet cute — if “cute” can mean griping about terrible bosses, sneaking into the restaurant’s cold storage for a frantic tryst, and deciding within minutes to upend their lives and move to the U.S. Years later, they’re installed in Mendocino with kids, a dream house, and the sheen of domestic perfection. Theo’s career soars, until, in a fit of magnanimity, he insists Ivy shouldn’t “die at the crucifix of family life.” He pushes her into opening a seaside restaurant with the glorious name We’ve Got Crabs! — it becomes the beginning of the end.

On the same night that Theo’s architectural “marvel” collapses, Ivy receives her first rave review. Ambition and resentment ignite. Soon, their perfect partnership curdles into open hostility, and then something nastier still. Roach directs the carnage with a brisk, caustic glee; in a tidy 105 minutes, the movie squeezes its A-list cast for every drop of vinegar.

Cumberbatch and Colman are deliciously matched, their chemistry less about romance than about combustion. They sink their teeth into McNamara’s dialogue, which is brilliantly funny — tart, filthy, and endlessly inventive — yet also sharp enough to cut to the bone. Beneath the flights of profanity and the laugh-a-minute absurdities lies a sincere interrogation of how marriages fracture: What happens when one partner drowns, when the other gasps for air, when love curdles into competition? The writing leaves you in stitches, but it also leaves you unsettled.

A still from 'The Roses'

The supporting cast, stacked with comic livewires, provides its own deranged pleasures. Andy Samberg and Kate McKinnon play Barry and Amy, a couple teetering on the edge of ethical non-monogamy. McKinnon’s unhinged energy suggests something closer to non-ethical monogamy, a category all her own. Even amid such chaos, the film finds room for visual splendour — sunlit kitchens, crashing waves — and, unexpectedly, a new internet fixation: “Daddy Benedict Cumberbatch,” sprinting through Mendocino in short shorts, legs and ego equally exposed.

McNamara stages one dinner scene that earns instant entry into the annals of cinematic bloodsport, and both stars make sure their characters never collapse into caricature. Theo and Ivy are equally monstrous, equally sympathetic, equally deserving of each other’s wrath. The ending is abrupt, absurd, perhaps even unsatisfying — but it hardly matters. By then, we’ve already relished the thrill of watching two brilliant actors take their characters, and each other, to pieces.

To say the film is “deliciously devious” is to grasp its greatest pleasure: the giddy thrill of watching a marriage disintegrate in real time. The opposite of love isn’t hate, after all. It’s indifference. And Theo and Ivy, in their scorched-earth devotion to despising one another, remind us that even destruction can be its own kind of intimacy.

Camus imagined Sisyphus happy as he trudged up the hill, finding twisted joy in futility. The Roses imagines Theo and Ivy happy as they shove their marriage boulder uphill, only to watch it crash down in flames. There’s nothing more satisfying than the rubble left behind.