The Roses (2025) || What Happens When Love, Meets Ego?
Published on HivePostify by @teknon · Thu Sep 03 2026
Comedy being the genre of this film made me watch it as I was expecting a funny, messy marriage story, but I ended up thinking about something much bigger, how easily a woman’s ambition can become a problem the moment it outgrows the comfort of the man beside her. And this is where I found myself firmly on the woman’s side.
This is not because she is perfect, she absolutely isn’t. In fact, there are moments when both her and Theo behave so terribly that I wanted to confiscate their house, their phones and probably their access to one another. But beneath all the pettiness, resentment and increasingly ridiculous warfare between them, there was one thing I couldn’t get past. Why should Ivy’s career have to die simply because Theo’s career did?
Synopsis
The Roses follows Ivy Rose (Olivia Colman), a talented chef, and Theo (Benedict Cumberbatch), an ambitious architect who initially seem to have the kind of marriage people envy. They meet when both are frustrated by their respective careers and immediately connect over their shared ambition and dissatisfaction with the people above them. They fall in love, marry and eventually have twins.
For a while, their arrangement is fairly traditional. Theo’s architectural career takes centre stage while Ivy puts her own ambitions aside to focus on their children. She eventually begins developing her culinary career again, and her little seafood restaurant unexpectedly starts becoming a success. Then everything changes.
Theo’s professional dreams collapse spectacularly while Ivy’s career goes in the opposite direction. She becomes increasingly successful, while Theo becomes the stay-at-home parent and suddenly, the roles they once occupied are reversed.
That reversal exposes resentments neither of them had properly dealt with, and what begins as insecurity and jealousy gradually mutates into an increasingly vicious battle between two people who are still deeply connected but have seemingly forgotten how to love each other without competing.
And This Is Where I Became Team Ivy
Let me explain myself before anyone starts shouting. I understand Theo, I really do. Imagine being the person who once had the successful career, provided for the family and probably saw yourself as the person holding everything together, only for your career to collapse while your wife’s suddenly takes off. That has to hurt as your identity takes a hit, your confidence follows suit and perhaps even your perception of your place within your marriage takes a hit.
But where my sympathy for Theo started running out was when I awoke to the fact that Ivy didn’t cause his career to fail. Her success wasn’t an attack on him and I absolutely loved that she didn’t immediately decide that the solution was to make herself smaller so that her husband could feel bigger again. Because how often are women expected to do exactly that?
A woman succeeds and suddenly the conversation switches to: >“But what about her husband?” “Isn’t she spending too much time at work?” “Who is taking care of the children?” “Does she really need to be this ambitious?”
Yet when the roles are reversed, a man’s career is rarely treated as something his wife should sacrifice to protect his ego. This film puts that double standard right in front of us.
The part I think was easy to overlook was that Ivy had already sacrificed for the family and she wasn’t some career-obsessed woman who suddenly remembered she had children. She had already put her career on hold. She stayed home with the children while Theo pursued his architectural ambitions. She supported him while he worked toward his professional dreams. So when her opportunity finally comes, why exactly should she throw it away because Theo is struggling? Well I loved that she didn’t.
I don’t mean this because being present for your family doesn’t matter. Of course it does but because motherhood shouldn’t automatically become the graveyard where a woman’s ambitions are buried.
Ivy is allowed to love her children and still love her work. She is allowed to be a mother and a chef, she is allowed to want something that belongs to her and she shouldn’t have to apologise for succeeding simply because her husband is currently struggling.
But on the realistic side, Ivy Wasn’t Completely Innocent Now, before I start sounding like her unpaid lawyer, she annoyed me too, like a lot. This is because success doesn’t automatically make you right. Ivy becomes so consumed by her career and by proving that she can succeed that she sometimes fails to recognise how much Theo is struggling and while I understand why she refuses to sacrifice her career, I also think she could have communicated better.
There is a difference between saying, “I refuse to abandon my career for your comfort.” and, “Your feelings don’t matter because I’m finally winning.”
Ivy occasionally wandered dangerously close to the second one. So yes, I was rooting for her professionally but emotionally? Girl, please.
About Theo, his problem was bigger than his career and what bothered me much was that his resentment eventually stopped being about circumstances and became about entitlement. He seemed to expect Ivy to respond to his professional downfall in the way he had once expected her to respond to his career ambitions.
But there is a major difference.When Theo was succeeding, Ivy adjusted her life to accommodate his career. When Ivy succeeded, Theo wanted her to adjust hers to accommodate his failure and that distinction says a lot.
It made me wonder whether Theo actually wanted an equal partner or whether he was more comfortable when Ivy’s ambitions existed at a manageable distance from his own. It's easy to say you support a woman’s dreams when those dreams aren’t threatening your position. The real test comes when she starts doing better than you. Now this is where the film gets uncomfortable.
I think this film is at its best when it stops being simply a story about a couple fighting and starts asking questions about gender, identity and marriage. What happens when the woman becomes the primary earner? What happens when the man becomes the stay-at-home parent? What happens when the wife starts receiving the recognition the husband once received? And most importantly, Can a relationship survive when the people inside it stop fitting the gender roles they unconsciously built their marriage around?
Because Theo isn’t necessarily angry that Ivy is successful. He’s angry about what her success makes him feel about himself and those are two very different things.
Now my biggest frustration with both of them was that their marriage was probably also a competition. These two people genuinely loved each other, it’s kinda clear. Their chemistry is ridiculous. Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch make their relationship believable enough that even when they are behaving like absolute lunatics, I still believe that these two people once genuinely adored each other.
But somewhere along the way, love became a competition. Who sacrifices more?Who earns more? Who works harder? Who gets more attention? Who is the better parent? Who deserves the house? Who has given up more? And once a marriage becomes a scoreboard, everybody loses.
The children were also caught in the middle as I found the parenting aspect interesting because the film doesn’t pretend that career choices exist in a vacuum.
Ivy’s growing success means Theo spends more time at home with their children, and that creates another source of resentment. There is a painful irony here. When Ivy was the one sacrificing her career to raise the children, that sacrifice was almost invisible. Now that Theo is doing it, his role becomes part of his grievance and that made me think about how much unpaid caregiving is simply expected of women.
Women can spend years doing it and nobody calls it a career sacrifice worth acknowledging. But the moment a man becomes the primary caregiver, suddenly everyone notices the sacrifice. That doesn’t mean Theo’s contribution isn’t valuable. But Ivy’s was valuable too.
For me, The Roses isn’t really about whether Ivy or Theo is right. It’s about what happens when a woman refuses to make herself smaller.
Ivy’s career doesn’t destroy their marriage. Their inability to adapt to changing circumstances does. Theo’s career failing isn’t the problem either but his inability to separate his professional failure from his personal worth is. And Ivy’s success isn’t the villain. The problem is that neither of them knows how to exist in a marriage where they aren’t constantly measuring their worth against each other.
What I liked about Ivy is that she didn’t abandon herself. That’s the biggest thing I took from her character. She had already given years of herself to her family. When an opportunity finally came along that was hers, she took it. And I refuse to criticise a woman simply because her success makes someone else uncomfortable.
A woman’s ambition should not be treated as a marital inconvenience. If a man can pursue his dreams while his wife supports him, then a woman should be allowed the same freedom. Marriage should be a partnership, not a rotating system where one person’s dreams are always prioritised.
Finally, this film is funny, uncomfortable, occasionally ridiculous and surprisingly relevant. I went with expectations of just a story about a marriage falling apart but what I found was a story about what happens when love meets ego, ambition, gender expectations and changing power dynamics. And yes, I was firmly Team Ivy when it came to her career.
She didn’t owe Theo the death of her ambition simply because his own career had taken a nosedive but I also don’t think Ivy was completely right in how she handled everything that came afterward. Feminism isn’t about saying women are automatically right. It’s about recognising that women deserve the same room to be ambitious, flawed, successful and complicated that men have always been given.
Ivy didn’t need to become less successful for Theo to feel like a man. Theo needed to understand that her success wasn’t his failure and perhaps that is the saddest part of the entire film.
These two people could have celebrated each other’s victories. Instead, they turned love into a competition where one person’s gain had to mean the other’s loss and once you start seeing your partner’s success as something being taken from you, the relationship is already in trouble.
Rating: 8/10.
PS: the film ends rather tragically.
Posted Using [INLEO](https://inleo.io/@teknon/the-roses-2025-what-happens-when-love-meets-ego-dgd)
Tags: #hive-166847#Moviereview#Cinema#Tvshows#comedy#neoxian#Ocd#msp#bd#gems