‘Splitsville’ Review: Unruly Screwball Comedy Offers Extreme Scenes From a Marriage

Cannes 2025: Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin wed their blustery comic tone with the star power of Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona The post ‘Splitsville’ Review: Unruly Screwball Comedy Offers Extreme Scenes From a Marriage appeared first on TheWrap.

May 24, 2025 - 17:40

‘Splitsville’ Review: Unruly Screwball Comedy Offers Extreme Scenes From a Marriage

Take it as an informal rule – in cinema as in life – that the couple boasting about their open marriage will probably not make it. As a corollary, take it on faith that the comedy duo of Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin are uniquely adept at mining that premise for laughs. At least from the male perspective.

After rising with the 2019 bro-down “The Climb,” director Covino and his co-star and co-writer Marvin have wed their blustery comic tone with the star power of Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, yielding the unruly screwball comedy “Splitsville.” If less coiled and emotionally acute than their previous effort, “Splitsville” is every bit as funny – if not more so – often leaving the audience in stitches at the film’s Cannes Film Festival premiere. For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, may this couple stay together forever.

Indeed, the co-writers have taken those vows uniquely to heart, now structuring their second film in a row around fortune’s rise and fall, as experienced by two New York frenemies. As befitting this film’s wider scope and starrier cast, that mercurial wheel spins with much greater velocity – beginning with an opening set-piece that spans sex and death and car wrecks and expertly-timed male nudity all before we hit the title card.

As filmmakers, Covino and Marvin are singularly committed to each bit, pushing all premises to the comic extreme. Their characters, however, are less than steadfast and true.

By the time goodnatured schoolteacher Carey (Kyle Marvin) reaches his best friend’s Hamptons house, he’s already experienced calamity. No, not that opening crash – that was only a preamble to the real bomb: His wife Ashley (Adria Arjona) wants a divorce. If at first his affluent friends Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and Julie (Dakota Johnson) sympathize without quite understanding – “We have money and a kid, we can never get divorced,” says Paul – they then immediately start bragging about their perfect open marriage. And you know the rule.

That Carey and Julie end up getting frisky doesn’t exactly help – leading to a knock-down, drag-out brawl between the bros that exemplifies the film’s maximalist approach. Onscreen, the two frenemies burst through windows and walls, quite literally playing with fire; in the writing room, some time prior, the same pair worked in a similar way – goading one another to lock in and up the ante for every possible premise. “Splitsville” then plays as a pitched game of Chicken, following characters as they dig in their heels, daring the other party to blink.

To wit: In order to salvage his marriage, Carey agrees to open it up. Ashley responds by taking home a new man every night, leading the husband to befriend each and every one, building out a bro-coterie headquartered in their shared home. Wearing his director’s hat, Covino stages this weeks-spanning sequence to resemble an unbroken take, capturing this escalating domestic absurdity with his own visual showmanship.

Though ostensibly a film about two couples, “Splitsville” really hinges on the filmmakers’ zero-sum game. One can only rise when the other falls, and so once Carey rebuilds his confidence by rekindling his flame with the newly-split Julie, Paul bottoms out. And so on and so forth, and up and down, across zingers and set-pieces until the credits role. Above all, the film is a bromance between creative collaborators looking to pique each other’s sensibility and screen-persona. The women are just along for the ride.

Though Johnson and Arjona are also listed as producers, “Splitsville” really does little with their star appeal. Their characters share little of the film’s unruliness, instigating a fight or breaking one up, while the actresses look on from a bemused distance. When we do get a peek into Julie’s inner-life, Johnson’s character speaks as a parent concerned that she’s raising a version of her husband in miniature. “Splitsville” does much with that idea, running it all the way to the closing shot, promising a bright future for this kind of bromantic comedy that spins madly without ever reinventing the wheel.

Neon is releasing “Splitsville” in the U.S.

The post ‘Splitsville’ Review: Unruly Screwball Comedy Offers Extreme Scenes From a Marriage appeared first on TheWrap.