“You never know what something’s worth until you sink it,” says a certain character in Splitsville (United States, 2025), referring to a boat he’s about to vandalize. A not-so-subtle wink to tie together the tangled plot of divorces, romances, sex, and punches that has unfolded among its four protagonists: Kyle Marvin (also screenwriter), Michael Angelo Covino (who also directs), Dakota Johnson, and Adria Arjona.
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Marvin and Covino, also responsible for the thematically similar The Climb (USA, 2019), weave one of the most entertaining explorations of the emotional and sexual complexities of desire and romantic love in marriage. By far the better of the two films on similar subjects released this year starring Dakota Johnson, and the most interesting since Adria Arjona made hers with Richard Linklater.
What’s it about?
After a transformative experience, Ashley (Adria Arjona) suddenly asks Carey (Kyle Marvin) for a divorce, and he reacts in the worst way possible, running to take refuge with his best friend, Paul (Michael Angelo Covino) and his wife, Julie (Dakota Johnson), who have a beautiful mansion with a lake view.
When Carey asks them how they’ve made their marriage work, they reveal that they maintain a sexually open relationship. However, when this leads to Carey and Julie having a sexual encounter, cracks open in both the marriage and the friendship between the two men, unleashing chaos in their lives.
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Splitsville, to make Erich Fromm cry
As a romantic comedy, it should be said that Splitsville isn’t afraid to take things to absurd extremes. The entanglements can become as ridiculous as the physical comedy can become caricatured. Each of the four protagonists displays perfect comedic timing, which spices up the sharpest and wittiest dialogues you’ll see in a film of this type in a long time.
In this sense, it turns out to be an extremely fun film for its unpredictability: when it seems things have reached a breaking point, something even more absurd happens. Even if this can become overwhelming and stretch the suspension of disbelief to its limits, from a mere entertainment standpoint, it’s one of the best comedies of the year.
It helps that Corvino and Marvin, co-screenwriters, don’t approach their characters from a moralizing stance regarding their romantic situation. However, they do question them through comedy, and present us with each character’s emotional shortcomings: what makes it easy to identify with these characters is seeing how imperfect they are, how broken and empty they can be.
Splitsville as a whole isn’t prudish about polyamory, open relationships, polygamy, or whatever label you want to put on it. However, in the way its characters unfold, it reveals their complexities and practical challenges. It’s already complicated enough to get involved emotionally or sexually with one person and do the daily work of loving them.
The film suggests, at least, that the viability and success of polyamorous bonds goes far beyond mutual agreement and consent, especially in a world where the next relationship possibility is, like an on-demand catalog, just a swipe away. Although Covino and Marvin never condemn it—they aim to entertain, after all—there’s a suggested utilitarian quality in the way the characters relate to fill their own gaps of self-esteem, acceptance, ego, pleasure, and other shortcomings.
There remains a not-so-ambiguous stance on the matter toward the conclusion, but the director and screenwriter remain compassionate with their main quartet. In the end, it all comes down to how desire and the search for love can turn us into beings as pathetic and contradictory as they are endearing.
