Look, when a film rolls up with Benedict Cumberbatch, Olivia Colman, AND promises of thoughtful gender discourse, you don’t just watch — you prepare to take notes. The Roses (2025) had that energy.

The pitch: a couple whose picture-perfect life implodes when his career tanks and hers explodes, a showdown of two people equally consumed by ego and equally at fault for the wreckage.

This is not what happens, people.

What we have is a portrait that accidentally positions Ivy as the primary disaster while Theo comes across as a (relatively) reasonable guy slowly losing his mind. The filmmakers wanted to roast toxic masculinity. They instead stumbled into a case study in how success can turn anyone into a nightmare, and then refused to admit it.

Let’s take a look. *Sigh*

The “Fragile Ego” That Never Shows Up

The film confidently announces that Theo Rose has a fragile masculine ego that cannot handle his wife’s success. So naturally, we’re waiting for a man who will undermine, belittle, and sabotage. We’re ready for the ego meltdown. And it never comes.

Theo funds Ivy’s dream restaurant. When his naval history museum collapses during a storm, he loses his job and becomes the stay-at-home parent. Is he bitter about the situation? Yes. Does he ever complain? No. He manages the household, raises their twins to scholarship-winning excellence, and asks for — brace yourself — tile color opinions, emotional connection, and her presence at a promised dinner.

The nerve. The neediness. The… completely reasonable requests?

The film even tries to make Theo incriminate himself — selling the jealousy angle through his own mouth. When Ivy returns home after failing to commit to a schedule, he mutters: “Don’t be a d*ck, don’t be a d*ck, be happy.” The implication? He’s the jealous husband, desperately suppressing his resentment of her success. Except: nothing else supports this. He never undermines her career, never pulls the ‘well I stay home with the kids’ card, and never actually IS a d*ck about her success. What we’re ACTUALLY watching is a guy trying not to snap because he’s worn out.

The pattern is pretty consistent: the film TELLS us Theo can’t handle success while SHOWING us a man competently handling everything while being treated worse and worse. His fragile ego is nowhere to be seen.

The “Needy” Spouse Who… Communicates His Feelings

Perhaps the film’s most fascinating trick is its reframing of basic emotional needs as neediness. Throughout the film, Theo’s crime is not sabotage, undermining, or even passive aggression. It’s that he dares to articulate what he needs from his partner.

One of the film’s big moments is when Ivy delivers her verdict to Theo: “You are a bottomless pit of need!” She goes off on his crimes: wanting apologies, praise, attention, intimacy, Italian furniture, and Irish moss.

Hmm. The house? Ivy’s idea. Pitched to Theo when she eagerly wanted to fix their marriage. She hyped it as a shared paradise and told Theo to bring his creativity. And his crime is… bringing creativity? Granted, the moss and the knife in the middle of a dining table and whatnot are all ridiculous. But they are implied to be creative standards, not waste. Theo does not make Ivy go to work so he can have Irish moss.

And yes, the film wants Ivy’s outburst to read as dramatic overstatement. It’s obvious. But for exaggeration to hit. It needs a foundation. A crumb of validity. SOMETHING. When the accusation contains zero basis, it’s hard to sympathize.

Theo fires back with something uncomfortably raw: “I do need connection and an exchange of intimacy and the flawed nature of who I am validated as I journey through this life hoping that one person might see me, love me, and hold me.”

Again, this is overly dramatic on purpose. Yes, it’s both tragic AND hilarious. But it’s also healthy communication? He wants connection, not praise.

Then there’s the laundry incident. The clean laundry Theo has folded. Ivy picks it up from the sofa, puts it on the floor, and sits where it was. He gets sarcastic. The film presents this as evidence of his inability to support her success.

But strip away the framing and what do we have? An exhausted stay-at-home parent who has been denied promised breaks watches his partner put his completed domestic labor on the ground, and he… snaps. Sarcastically. That’s it. Sarcasm. And this is meant to prove his fragile ego?

The pattern repeats: Theo asks for tile color input during construction of the house Ivy commissioned. She answers her phone and ignores him — not for the first time, as the film implies. He: expresses frustration. Ivy: swallows raspberries (fruits that she’s allergic to) to see if he still “cares”. The scene’s message is once again clearly implied: Theo is needy, Theo needs to chill, Theo needs to reconsider his priorities.

The “neediness” we keep being told about here is actually a man having reasonable and sane expectations of partnership.

The “Control Freak Dad” Whose Kids Are Thriving

Now, the film has a backup thesis: Theo is a controlling father who stole Ivy’s children through rigid discipline. Psychological warfare!

Yeah, let’s talk about that.

Before Theo’s involvement, the children’s daily routine included eating pure sugar for breakfast, using public pavement as toilets (yes, this happens on screen), vomiting into cookie dough from sweet overload, and midnight ice cream wake-up calls.

Ivy, girl, that is not funny.

When Theo takes over, you feel a kind of secret relief. And the results under Theo’s management: sports scholarships, prestigious schools, happy and well-adjusted kids, respectful behavior toward both parents, clear life goals, etc.

The film can’t decide if Theo’s parenting is harmful control or competent caregiving. This ambiguity might work if both readings had equal merit. They do not.

So, when Ivy accuses Theo of “stealing her children,” it rings hollow. They are still right there, within reach, thriving, still caring about her. They just now prefer protein shakes and morning laps to sugary cereals.

The Double Standard?

All right, timeline:

When Theo was the breadwinner, there’s no evidence of him dismissing Ivy, ignoring her input, taking surprise business trips, or failing to maintain basic respect. When Ivy takes over the job, however, the pattern shifts: surprise trips without telling him, schedule disruptions that deny him breaks, ditching him on their ROMANTIC RECONNECTION GETAWAY to get drunk with friends, and, yes, laundry disrespect.

If the genders are reversed, we’d call these incidents what they are: contempt. But somehow when Ivy does it, it’s… what, justified ambition? A fumble?

And then there’s also that housewarming party scene where Ivy goes Scarlet Witch on everyone and destroys a dinner that was meant to celebrate Theo’s work.

And here’s an interesting detail: When fighting over the house later, Ivy weaponizes the fact that she paid for it, throwing this in Theo’s face until he retreats into silence. Because what can you even say to that? But Theo NEVER fires back with his own receipts: that he funded her first restaurant. Whether this restraint is intentional characterization or not, it makes Ivy look spectacularly worse.

And look, holding financial contributions over a stay-at-home spouse’s head? Not a great look on anyone. The gender of who’s doing it doesn’t make it less sketchy. But let’s not digress.

Yes, on some level, Ivy’s desperation to keep the house is understandable: it’s about clinging on to something they built together, it’s about keeping a tangible piece of Theo as he leaves. But does the film really let Ivy show this emotional vulnerability? Does it give Ivy the scenes needed to convey this truth?

What About Ivy Though?

Listen, Ivy isn’t just a cartoon villain. The film gives her real pathos. She starts as a lovable woman, supporting Theo’s career while raising twins. When opportunity comes, she seizes it. When Theo’s career sinks, she becomes the family’s financial foundation. Her exhaustion is real. Her drive is understandable. Her fear of being pulled back into domestic obligations resonates with legitimate concerns about how real-life women’s achievements are treated as negotiable.

But then she ditches the romantic dinner, humiliates him at his own celebration, tells him to dream, and then makes it sound like he’s the deranged one.

Her suffering is real. But it’s also almost entirely self-inflicted. We should feel for her. Yet, what we see is a woman creating her own misery while the film insists we blame her husband for having feelings about it.

Theo’s Actual Flaws (That The Film Ignores)

Here’s the thing: Theo does have genuine character flaws. They’re just not the ones the film wants to talk about.

He’s an architect who values aesthetics over practicality to such a degree that his design collapses. He’s such a bonehead that he designs an entire “smart home” and apparently forgets to install a gas leak detector. He’s an annoying perfectionist who obsesses over Irish moss and Italian furniture in ways that would drive anyone up the wall.

These are real and interesting flaws. They contribute to the marriage’s breakdown in tangible ways.

But the film doesn’t want to engage with these actual flaws. It instead takes the emotional outbursts that come from his exhaustion and legitimate frustration at being disrespected, and rebrand them as “ego,” “jealousy,” “neediness.”

We had the ingredients for a balanced portrait: Theo’s perfectionism and impracticality and Ivy’s workaholism. A nuanced exploration of mutual destruction was right there. Instead, we got… this.

Anyway…

 A film about ego and role reversal requires BOTH people to be genuinely flawed. When one character’s “flaws” are reasonable requests and the other’s are contemptuous behaviors, the balance crashes.

What we needed was courage: give Theo’s intended flaws some real teeth, or admit the unbalanced narrative and fix it. They couldn’t choose. So we are left wondering: If THIS counts as “both sides are wrong,” what would one-sided fault even look like?

Anyway, anyway, go see the movie. It’s still worth a watch.