Most couple therapists will be familiar with the moment when a pair they are working with, who have previously been at loggerheads over most subjects, decide to unify in opposition to the person they’ve chosen to try to help them.

This is what happens in an early scene from the new film, The Roses, a comedy directed by Jay Roach starring Olivia Coleman and Benedict Cumberbatch. Its central theme is the waxing and waning of a marriage relative to each partner’s professional success.

The encounter with the couples therapist is obviously played for laughs, and the skill of both actors means those laughs are delivered. But what might be more interesting to any therapist watching is the unhealthy contempt it reveals in both the characters.

The couple, Ivy and Theo, have moved from the UK to the US in order to fulfil Ivy’s culinary ambitions and to unlock Theo’s potential from the constraints of corporate design. It’s clear from the outset that Theo thinks he’s superior to most of his peers. They are jobbing architects, he’s an artist. Ivy seems to be the more mellow of the couple – witty, feminist, self-deprecating – but her inability to take anyone or anything seriously is clearly a defence which has a withering capacity too.

The Roses is a good looking film with a plot that cleverly takes real shape when the freak storm that fills Ivy’s struggling restaurant with sheltering and appreciative customers is the same one that brings Theo’s hubristic design for a maritime museum crashing down along with his career.

The couple’s fortunes are reversed. Theo’s very public humiliation has him licking his wounds as a house husband raising their twin children whilst Ivy’s restaurant receives rave reviews and goes from strength to strength. The divide between the couple opens up, the twins leave for a specialist sports’ college giving Ivy and Theo free rein to invent more and more imaginative ways to humiliate or insult each other. This they do with aplomb and the use of an architects’ pleasure in smart home devices is brilliantly deployed to comic effect.

The Roses is played very large, the central characters are, in many ways, grotesques, their ‘friends’ even more so. It’s often great fun and whilst drawn in caricature there is much that therapists will recognise as issues that threaten long-term, loving marriages gone sour.

Like so many couples before them Ivy and Theo fail to maintain a balance in their relationship that satisfies both their professional ambitions. They are not alone in finding their different parenting styles leads to conflict. Nor is it unusual for the children of rowing parents to find ways of leaving the home, or for them to express relief when divorce seems to be on the table. (One of my stepdaughters saw the film with me, referenced Letterbox’d on the way home and discovered that reviews by children of divorced parents often said they found The Roses funny but a hard watch.)

If some of The Roses is writ too large to allow suspension of disbelief or a really good laugh the charismatic skill of Coleman and Cumberbatch keeps us just about caring if the couple stay together. Whilst I doubt that I could have succeeded where the fictional couples therapist failed, I did wish that someone would help Theo and Ivy to communicate better, to drop their contempt and remember how to respect one another. Who knows, depending on the outcome of the explosive finale, that might be what happens if The Roses has a sequel.