Unique among Schroeter’s films, The Rose King takes the homoeroticism that underpins much of his work and brings it to the surface as the primary force driving the narrative. An elegant middle-aged woman and her adult son live on a ramshackle farm near the sea. The son’s two passions are his roses and the handsome young man he keeps in the barn. A perverse triangle forms: the woman and the young man each have anguished private rituals, while the son alternates between ignoring his mother’s solicitousness and engaging in a baroque and increasingly sadomasochistic worship of his lover’s body. Pitched somewhere between a sigh and a scream, the film glimpses into the void left by the failure of the transcendence promised by art, religion and sexuality.