Splitsville (2025)
Directed by: Michael Angelo Covino
Premise: Two couples experiment with open relationships in an attempt to save their marriages.
What Works: Splitsville is positioned as an anti-romantic comedy. Nice but vanilla couple Carey and Ashley (Kyle Marvin and Adria Arjona) break up when Ashley admits to infidelity. Carey flees to their friend’s vacation home where Julie and Paul (Dakota Johnson and Michael Angelo Covino) reveal they are non-monogamous. But that open-mindedness is quickly revealed to be fraudulent when Carey sleeps with Julie, setting both couples on a path of experimentation, betrayal, and divorce. Splitsville has a dark and absurd sense of humor. The fisticuffs between Carey and Paul is very funny in the manner of the street fights in Anchorman and They Live. However, the standout scenes of Splitsville are not the fights but a couple of domestic sequences, one a montage of Cary and Ashley’s post-breakup relationship and the other a child’s birthday party. The camerawork and the blocking of the action are impressive.
What Doesn’t: Splitsville is predicated on these couples being friends but that is hard to believe. The couples occupy very different economic strata. Julie and Paul own a multimillion-dollar vacation home and enroll their son in an expensive private school; Carey is the gym teacher at that school. The couples are linked through the husbands; Carey and Paul were childhood buddies but it is hard to imagine that ever being the case. The marriage between Julie and Paul is especially unbelievable because Paul is so unlikable. Actor Michael Angelo Covino is doing exactly what’s required of him and that’s the problem. The men of Splitsville are insufferable. They are perpetually immature and whinny. This is supposed to be a love story of sorts which means the audience ought to want to see these couples figure it out and live happily ever after but the filmmakers leave us wanting all four people to split up. Splitsville mirrors the pretentiousness of its characters. The filmmakers entertain the idea of nonmonogamy but they don’t really explore it or understand it. The topic was dealt with more interestingly in 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice than it is in Splitsville whose observations about contemporary relationships comes across more thoughtless than ambiguous.
Bottom Line: Splitsville has moments that are funny and biting and absurd but the characters are frequently unbelievable and off-putting. The film doesn’t say much about contemporary romance and Splitsville is ultimately uninvolving.
Episode: #1064 (September 14, 2025)