‘Rosebush Pruning’ Review: A Petty Provocation

“I don’t write, I don’t read, I don’t drive,” says the narrator of “Rosebush Pruning.” We don’t care. That can be said for most of this movie, a petty provocation that, like a spent blossom in time-lapse, shrivels and disintegrates as soon as it’s over.

The line comes from Ed (Callum Turner), one of four adult brats living with their father (Tracy Letts), a blind lecher, in a Modernist villa in Spain. The elitist siblings, including the clothes horses Anna (Riley Keough) and Robert (Lukas Gage), mistrust everyone outside the ménage and revere their eldest brother, Jack (Jamie Bell). But Jack has recently started dating Martha (Elle Fanning), unsettling the fragile ecosystem of their familial walled garden.

Incest is implied early on; it is later made explicit. Even with this taboo thrust upon a comely cast, the director Karim Aïnouz fails to stir any interest. The screenplay, from Efthimis Filippou, reaches toward the perverse intrigue of “Dogtooth,” a film he wrote with his frequent collaborator, Yorgos Lanthimos. But in the hands of Aïnouz, the material is at once grating and boring, not deadpan enough to arrive at absurdism nor subtle enough to become a curio.

One lunch scene with the whole gang alleviates some of our apathy. In it, Letts’s character asks Anna to describe Martha’s bosom. If he could see, he argues, he would have already checked it out. For a brief moment, the actor’s trademark dry wit takes hold, achieving a satire of insular silver-spoon households to which the rest of the movie can only aspire.

Rosebush Pruning Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.