Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin ensure that every sequence in the movie has some kind of visual or narrative trick up its sleeve.The Associated Press
Splitsville
Directed by Michael Angelo Covino
Written by Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin
Starring Kyle Marvin, Michael Angelo Covino, Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona
Classification 14A; 100 minutes
Opens in theatres Aug. 22
Critic’s Pick
As much as we (ie. critics) like to bemoan the current state of big-screen comedy, the past eight months have delivered a relative bounty of larger-than-life laughs. The multiplex might be far removed from the days when Judd Apatow and his acolytes ruled every other weekend – today, Seth Rogen and Jason Segel are too busy in the halls of Apple TV+ – but I’ve been finding seriously silly solace with the likes of Friendship, The Naked Gun and the forthcoming Canadian epic Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Now we can add Splitsville to the collection of contemporary cut-ups, with the new comedy so relentlessly funny that you’ll swear we’re back in 2007.
The latest collaboration from Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin – whose 2018 buddy comedy The Climb was a sleeper on the festival circuit – Splitsville follows two deeply unhappy couples who find themselves with a new perspective on life and love after experimenting with, for lack of a better term, inadvertent polyamory.
On one side is the meek grade-school teacher Carey (Marvin) and his more sexually adventurous wife Ashley (Adria Arjona), a couple who in the film’s opening sequence – a genuinely outrageous set piece that culminates in one of the greatest visual gags in ages – are on the verge of divorce. The two break up just as they are on the way to visit real-estate developer Paul (Covino) and his wife Julie (Dakota Johnson), who are both far wealthier and seemingly far happier, having opened up their marriage some time ago.
But as these things go, no one in the quartet is truly satisfied, and soon Carey is sleeping with Julie, and Paul is trying to convince Ashley to go to bed with him in an act of half-cocked revenge. But there is so much more complexity and elasticity to the characters and their up-and-down dynamics, including Ashley’s revolving door of would-be lovers, each of whom Carey quickly befriends as soon as they fall out of his ex-wife’s favour.
Splitsville lives up to its title and then some.The Associated Press
Not content to simply let scenes live or die on the strength of dialogue, Covino (who directs) and Marvin (who writes) together ensure that every sequence has some kind of visual or narrative trick up its sleeve. At one point, the camera constantly swerves around Carey’s small but jam-packed-with-people loft. At another, it ducks in and out of Paul’s expansive beach house. There is a relentless energy to the pair’s gags – including a riotous fight between Carey and Paul that rivals the stunt work of a John Wick movie – that anchors the film somewhere between relatable and absurd.
Meanwhile, Johnson and Arjona – the actresses possessing more familiar faces than their on-screen husbands – are immensely captivating as women who might not know what they want in life, but definitely know more than their clueless partners. While Johnson goes far above her typically muted charm (this is The Materialists’ star’s more beguiling romcom of 2025), Arjona is even better as the frustrated Ashley. The actress not only leapfrogs over the third-degree-burn sex appeal of her femme fatale in last year’s Hit Man but also adds layers of emotional vulnerability that make every one of her character’s punchlines hit that much harder.
By the time that the four performers are crammed together in a dizzying sequence involving impromptu sex, a children’s birthday party and the antics of a professional mentalist (played by Succession’s superbly stammering Nicholas Braun), Splitsville lives up to its title and then some. Guts will be busted, and sides will be split. Heck, moviegoers might even learn to kiss and make up with comedies for good.
