Nothing says ‘rom-com' like a sledgehammer through a kitchen island.
At least, that's the vibe from The Roses, Jay Roach's savage new comedy starring Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch as a picture-perfect couple unraveling like a cashmere sweater in a dog's mouth. The trailer, just dropped by Searchlight Pictures, starts with a warm glow and ends in metaphorical (and maybe literal) fire.
This isn't The Notebook—it's The Notebook if both leads were armed with lawyers, passive aggression, and really good interior design taste.
“All's fair when love is war.”
The logline isn't subtle—and neither is the trailer. We see Ivy (Colman) and Theo (Cumberbatch) living the Instagram dream: beautiful house, smiling kids, dual careers. But then, as Theo's architecture career implodes, Ivy's takes off, flipping the power dynamic and lighting the fuse on years of simmering resentment. The split? It's less Gwyneth Paltrow's “conscious uncoupling” and more Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets HGTV demolition derby.
In tone and escalation, Roach's remake doesn't just nod to the original 1989 War of the Roses—it gleefully dropkicks it. That film, starring Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner, was famously acidic. But 2025's The Roses? It's dripping with the kind of venom that only two Oscar winners can deliver with a smile.
The comedy of cruelty: a trend reborn?
This isn't a fluke. We're in a renaissance of “dark domestic” films—comedies that mine the mess of modern relationships, like Noah Baumbach's Marriage Story or Emerald Fennell's Saltburn, where emotional damage becomes spectacle.
What makes The Roses stand out is how funny it dares to be while pushing emotional realism to the edge. Colman weaponizes warmth like only she can—her Ivy isn't a villain, just someone who got tired of waiting her turn. And Cumberbatch? He's doing unhinged with the calm precision of a man who once played Sherlock and Doctor Strange. The descent into chaos is played with clockwork timing—like watching a Rube Goldberg machine of mutual destruction.
Jay Roach, of Austin Powers and Bombshell fame, knows how to make big emotional swings feel palatable. He's working here with The Favourite's Tony McNamara, which explains the cutting dialogue. Think: period-piece venom in a modern California kitchen.
What's old is new (and way more cynical)
Let's not forget: this story is 40 years old. Warren Adler's 1981 novel satirized the illusion of suburban happiness. The '89 film captured '80s yuppie disillusionment. Now, The Roses arrives in an age of performative marriage and burnout ambition. The satire lands differently—because we are different.
We don't expect perfect marriages anymore. But we do expect honesty—and that's where the trailer cuts deepest. It doesn't just depict a couple breaking up. It depicts the ideology of the nuclear couple being torn apart, one smug dinner party at a time.
