Rosebush Pruning      Director: Karim AïnouzCert: 18Starring: Callum Turner, Jamie Bell, Riley Keough, Lukas Gage, Elle Fanning, Tracy Letts, Pamela Anderson, Elena AnayaRunning Time: 1 hr 35 mins“The rich are different from you and me,” F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote. But surely not so different as all this. Karim Aïnouz, the Brazilian director of the rightly acclaimed The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão, working with Efthimis Filippou, the Greek screenwriter of The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, go beyond the bounds of polite excess with this overheated, proudly decadent satire of loaded Americans abroad.The script must have read well. How else would Aïnouz have gathered together a cast that includes Tracy Letts (as dental-hygiene perv dad), Riley Keough (nano-talented rock-singer daughter), Jamie Bell (initially compliant elder son), Callum Turner (alleged fashionista younger brother), Pamela Anderson (mother wrongly believed to have been eaten by wolves) and Elle Fanning (near-human girlfriend to Jack). Maybe the cast read only as far as a good early line promising mayhem that is delivered late and only in part. “People are roses,” Turner intones. “Families are rosebushes. Rosebushes need pruning.”Before we get to the hacking with stand-in secateurs, we must endure a great deal of performative weirdness from that extraordinary array of talent. This insanely wealthy family have recently relocated to Catalonia and remained there despite some believing the tale about mum’s lupine consumption. (She is, in fact, living nearby with a lesbian lover.)The degree of revolting harmony in the household is disrupted when Bell’s character threatens to move out with Fanning’s talented classical guitarist. The poor girl gets a good impression of her potential in-laws’ dysfunction at a luncheon at which the blind patriarch demands a close description of everything about her, including her breasts.This sounds like the sort of thing Filippou had bleak fun with in those earlier collaborations with Yorgos Lanthimos. In films such as The Killing of a Sacred Deer there was, however, always a sense of a hidden clockwork that imposed its own perverse logic on the action. Every actor strains their sinews here, but we are left with only with nose-thumbing randomness. One can hardly blame the film for having such disdain for its dreadful characters. One is less forgiving of its apparent disdain for the audience.Rosebush Pruning looks absolutely beautiful. (The scenery is working hard.) The anger at vulgar excess is justified. But here is a film too smug in its own show-off depravity. In cinemas from Friday, July 10th