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‘Splitsville’ movie review: Love, lies, and seething
‘Splitsville’ movie review: Love, lies, and seething
Michael Angelo Covino's Cannes-premiering Splitsville is an unruly rom-com that knows precisely how imprudent its quartet of adults can be. Covino directs from a script he co-wrote with long-time collaborator Kyle Marvin, who also stars alongside Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona. The setup of two couples, one open marriage, and one impending divorce is disarmingly simple, yet the film finds its momentum through the small humiliations that pile up when desire, insecurity and misplaced idealism collide. How these characters attempt to sort out their rules, boundaries and grievances becomes the backbone of how this story treats romance as an emotional negotiation (and some sort of contact sport).
Splitsville opens on a stretch of highway, moments before catastrophe. Kyle Marvin's Carey and Adria Arjona's Ashley are a couple trying to manufacture a moment of intimacy and end up watching another couple's life collapse in the median. When Ashley suddenly confesses her infidelity in the aftermath, Carey's stunned silence becomes the film's emotional hinge. Now a man too overwhelmed to argue and too adrift to stand still, he makes a spontaneous pilgrimage through yards and marshland toward his best friend Paul (played by Covino himself) and his wife Julie's (a striking Dakota Johnson) beach house to drown his sorrows.
Covino and Marvin soon treat their long friendship as something lived through the body, in the film's standout sequence. The two pals turn the expensive furniture in a beautiful, sunlit living room to debris in one of the year's most defining on-screen brawls. The fight has a slapstick rhythm and choreography that resembles that controlled sense of mayhem Jackie Chan shaped in his early comedies.
The blow-up had been brewing ever since Paul and Julie walked us through the logic of their open marriage that laid out boundaries in theory while exposing how fragile those boundaries feel in practice. The exchange is written with a light, almost smug confidence that couples use when they want to sound more evolved, and the illusion unsurprisingly shatters once Carey sleeps with Julie.
A still from ‘Splitsville' | Photo Credit: NEON
Paul tries to hold on to the rhetoric he once delivered so smoothly, but every line he throws out trembles with the sting of realising how freedom feels different when it loops back to the people closest to him. When the fight finally breaks, the room is thick with the insecurity he kept insisting he had transcended. These bouts keep resurfacing across the film, and each one is shaped by impulse rather than strategy, with the two men flinging themselves through space because they lack the vocabulary to say what they mean.
Marvin gives Carey a puppyish charm and terrible timing. Covino plays Paul with a brittle, coastal-elite smugness. The film really tests the limits of suspending our disbelief trying to convince us that Julie and Ashley might be drawn to either of these losers. Meanwhile, Johnson plays Julie with a dry, private humour. Her lines land as if she is sifting through several reactions before choosing the least dramatic one. Arjona gives Ashley a brisk, improvisational energy, and her scenes with the rotating assortment of one-night-stands and the plethora of insecure men sulking at the edge of rooms, have an exhausted appeal.
Carey slides into both of their orbits with a sweetness that borders on delusion. His attachment to Julie grows from shared vulnerability, yet he reads every glance as possibility. And when he returns home and proposes an open arrangement to Ashley, the suggestion is riddled with a queasy sincerity and opportunism. He has taken Paul and Julie's model at face value, assuming their rehearsed ease is proof of stability rather than a mask for everything they have been trying to quiet. The script nudges this idea of how people borrow the language of liberation without understanding its cost. Celine Song often circles similar terrain when her characters move through desire with the belief that adulthood grants immunity from hurt, only to find that commitment remains the one thing no one can intellectualise their way past.
A still from ‘Splitsville' | Photo Credit: NEON
Covino and Marvin structure the film as a sequence of encounters that push the quartet toward fresh chaos. Each chapter edges them closer to the same question: what happens when everyone involved wants clarity for themselves and ambiguity for everyone else? The open-marriage logic disintegrates the minute it stops serving its original purpose, and the reactions that follow expose how quickly a supposedly “healthy” framework turns brittle.
Splitsville feels strangely honest about how desire scrambles even the best intentions. The film keeps its critique grounded in behaviour by simply watching its characters try to live out theories they were never equipped to maintain. The honesty of that collective delusion gives the whole thing its waggish charm.
Splitsville is currently available on BookMyShow Stream
Published - November 17, 2025 04:49 pm IST
English cinema / World cinema / reviews
Source: TheHindu
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