What The Roses Gets Wrong About Couples Therapy
The Roses opens in a couples therapy session. Ivy and Theo Rose are asked to name ten things they love about each other. Theo offers: "I'd rather live with her than a wolf." Ivy counters: "He has arms."
They continue like this, trading increasingly brutal insults disguised as compliments, laughing at their own wit while their therapist grows visibly uncomfortable. Eventually she stops them. "I see so much resentment," she says. "I don't think you have the capacity to fix your problems."
She ends the session. They leave. The film then shows us how they got here.
It's a funny scene. Cumberbatch and Colman are clearly enjoying themselves, demonstrating the kind of caustic British banter that keeps marriages interesting or destroys them completely, depending. The therapist's horror plays for laughs. The whole thing sets up what we're about to see: a marriage that looks vicious from the outside but is actually something more complicated underneath.
Here's what the film gets right: sometimes couples use therapy as another venue for their usual dynamic. The session becomes performance. They're showing the therapist who they are together, but not in the way she needs to see.
Here's what it gets completely wrong: the therapist's response.
When a therapist gives up
The therapist in The Roses does what weak therapists do when couples are difficult. She takes their behaviour at face value, decides they're beyond help, and sends them away.
A competent therapist would have done something entirely different.
When a couple walks in performing this kind of routine, making each other laugh with mutual evisceration, a skilled therapist doesn't get horrified. They get interested. Because what you're watching isn't the problem. It's a defence against the problem.
These two people are showing you exactly how they avoid being vulnerable with each other. They've turned intimacy into a comedy routine. They've made cruelty safe by making it funny. They can say devastating things as long as they're both laughing.
The therapist's job isn't to be shocked. It's to point out what's happening underneath the performance.
Something like: "You're both very good at this. The insults are impressive. But I'm wondering what happens if you stop being funny for a minute. What would you actually need to say to each other that isn't wrapped in a joke?"
That intervention doesn't make good cinema. It's too quiet, too ordinary. There's no dramatic walkout, no satisfying moment of therapeutic failure to propel the plot forward.
But it's what the work actually requires.
The problem with giving up
The therapist's declaration that they "don't have the capacity" to fix their problems is presented as an honest assessment. She's seen what she's seen. These people are too far gone.
Except she's wrong. We know she's wrong because the film spends the next ninety minutes showing us she's wrong.
Ivy and Theo aren't difficult. They're defended. They use their intelligence and their humour as weapons and shields. But underneath all of that, they're terrified of losing each other. Even when they're at their worst, hurting each other in increasingly creative ways, what they're really saying is: I need you to see me, and I don't know how to ask for that without destroying everything first.
The film shows this repeatedly. After every escalation, they find their way back to each other. They reconcile, tearfully. They remember why they fell in love. Then something else happens and they're at war again.
This isn't a couple who can't be helped. It's a couple stuck in a pattern they don't know how to escape. That's exactly what therapy is meant to address.
But their therapist sent them away after one session.
What she should have seen
A good therapist watching that opening scene would have noticed several things:
They're performing for her. Every insult is delivered for maximum effect, timed perfectly, calibrated to get a reaction. They're not having a genuine exchange. They're doing a bit they've perfected over years together.
They're unified in their performance. Despite supposedly being there to work on their relationship, they're completely aligned in their goal: to shock the therapist, to demonstrate their sophistication, to control what happens in the room.
They're laughing together. After each barb lands, they share a moment of genuine delight. Whatever's broken between them, this specific kind of connection still works. They can still make each other laugh, even when the jokes are cruel.
The real work would be inviting them to drop the performance. Not by being shocked or appalled, but by being genuinely curious about what they're protecting themselves from.
"You two are very entertaining. But I'm wondering if that's become a problem. If being clever together means you never have to be sad together. Or frightened together. Or admit to each other that you have no idea how to fix this."
The couple who still love each other
The film makes clear throughout that Ivy and Theo never stopped loving each other. Their problem isn't absence of love. It's that they don't know how to stay connected through major life changes. When Theo's career collapses and Ivy's takes off, they lose their footing. Resentment builds. Small wounds accumulate.
But they keep finding their way back. Even in the film's final moments, after they've hurt each other in terrible ways, they admit the truth: they still love each other. They never wanted the divorce. They just didn't know how to say that without risking another disappointment.
This is the kind of couple therapy is meant to help. Not the ones who genuinely hate each other and need permission to leave, but the ones who are stuck in destructive patterns despite loving each other deeply.
The therapist gave up on them before giving them a chance to be honest.
What good couples work actually does
The film treats the therapy scene as evidence that some couples are beyond help. What it actually demonstrates is that some therapists aren't equipped to handle couples who use intelligence and humour as defence.
Real couples therapy with a pair like the Roses would be slow, frustrating work. You'd spend weeks, maybe months, trying to create enough safety that they could risk being direct with each other. Every time they tried to escape into banter, you'd gently bring them back. You'd name the pattern without shaming them for it.
"You just made a joke. What were you about to say before you made it funny?"
"You're both laughing. What would happen if you let yourself be sad instead?"
"That's a very clever observation about your dynamic. Can you say it without the analysis? Just the feeling underneath?"
It's not dramatic. It won't make audiences laugh. But it's the only way through for couples who've learned to perform connection instead of risking the real thing.
The tragic irony
The film ends with Ivy and Theo finally being honest with each other. After escalating to actual violence, they stop. Theo locks himself in the bathroom. Ivy stands outside the door and asks if he really meant it when he said he never stopped loving her.
He did. She never stopped either. They reconcile. Then the house explodes from a gas leak caused by their fight. They die together.
The film presents this as darkly comedic tragedy. But they were capable of that honest conversation all along. They just needed someone who could help them have it before they destroyed everything first.
What the film accidentally reveals
The Roses thinks it's showing us that some marriages are unfixable. What it actually shows is what happens when people in crisis don't get the help they need.
Ivy and Theo weren't too far gone. They were defended, frightened people doing what defended, frightened people do: they protected themselves with cleverness and cruelty because being vulnerable felt too dangerous.
A skilled therapist would have seen through that. Would have stayed steady while they performed. Would have kept inviting them to drop beneath the banter and say what they actually meant.
Instead, their therapist took their defence as evidence of hopelessness and sent them back into the world to destroy each other.
The film uses this as a plot device. It has to get them out of therapy quickly so the rest of the story can unfold. But in doing so, it perpetuates a damaging myth: that some couples are simply beyond help, that you can know this from one session, that therapy is useless for people who are too smart or too damaged or too defended.
None of that is true.
The real lesson
If you're watching The Roses and recognising something of your own relationship in it, here's what you need to know: the fact that you're clever about your problems doesn't mean you can't change. The fact that you use humour to avoid vulnerability doesn't mean you're doomed. The fact that you're both defended doesn't mean you're beyond help.
It means you need a therapist who won't give up after one difficult session.
Someone who can see through the performance to what you're protecting. Someone who won't be impressed by your psychological sophistication but will be genuinely interested in what happens when you stop being sophisticated for a minute. Someone who can hold steady while you're difficult, who won't take your defences personally, who knows that the couples who present as hopeless are often the ones who most desperately want hope.
The therapist in The Roses failed Ivy and Theo. Not because they were unfixable, but because she couldn't see past their defence to the terrified people underneath.
Don't let that be your story.
For couples therapy in Croydon or online: hello@talktoluke.com
