SPLITSVILLE - Mark Reviews Movies

Splitsville, Neon

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 4, 2025

A fight ends the first act of Splitsville. That's an understatement in a couple of ways, actually. "Fight" undersells the brutally realistic but quite funny brawl between best friends Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Paul (Michael Angelo Covino), as it goes through several rooms in a two-story house, uses whatever might be around them as weapons, sees the grown men resorting to childishly desperate moves, and, eventually, has the two take it outside in an unexpected manner.

It's also an understatement, however, to say that the clash ends the first act of this movie. After it's finished, the most palpable dramatic tension of the screenplay, written by the two stars, has basically been resolved. Where could it go from there?

That seems to be a struggle for Covino, who also directed, and Marvin to determine, especially since the characters played by the two screenwriters seem to be of primary interest to them. It's amusing that, simply because they are more famous, the women stars, Dakota Johnson and Adria Arjona, get top billing in the movie, if only because the presence and development of the characters they play here might have given the material more room to maneuver.

Instead, Johnson's Julie, who's married to Paul, and Arjona's Ashley, who's married to Carey, exist mainly as goal for the two men. What the guys want in this story is obvious, since they rarely shut up about it. As for what these women want, it's much tougher to determine, since they basically go along with whatever the script needs them to do.

That's especially strange, because the entire story starts on account of both Ashley and Julie making very clear decisions. The first one comes after a disastrous road trip for Carey and Ashley that doesn't actually arrive at its destination.

Along the way, Ashley becomes frisky with her husband while he's driving, and an aggressive, drunk driver behind them gets annoyed, speeds up, and starts swerving on the road. The car flips, and Carey and Ashely stop to help, only to find the driver fine but his wife dead. That the movie ultimately makes a joke out of the scene, based on what was happening in the car before the incident, at least sets up the notion that this is going to be a very awkward and uncomfortable experience.

Anyway, the random woman's death forces Ashley to finally act on feelings she has had for about a month. After only a little more than a year of marriage to Carey, she wants a divorce. He gets out of the car and starts running, not stopping until he reaches Paul and Julie's beach house several hours and some amount of swimming, as well, later.

After a lot of complaining and misery from their guest about his marriage collapsing, Paul and Julie reveal that they have opened up their own marriage sexually. They both say they're fine with it, but after Julie and Carey have sex while Paul's away on business, the husband makes it plain that he's not really okay with it. The two men fight in spectacularly sloppy and juvenile fashion.

To be fair, there is some funny stuff that follows, as Carey suggests he and Ashley open up their marriage, only for him to entertain and help a growing line of her current and former lovers at the couple's house. Meanwhile, Paul and Julie's marriage falls apart, although it has nothing to do with any extramarital sex the two might be having. Julie seems to still be attracted to and maybe even have feelings for Carey, but since the whole movie is mainly about the two men and their insecurities and their apparent inability to be alone or at least without the constant reassurance of a romantic partner, who can tell for certain, really?

The movie, then, is more a situational comedy than anything else, as partners and entire households, actually, rotate, since Paul has moved in with Carey and Ashley while he waits to see if Julie will divorce him, while Julie admits to Carey that she thinks he might be a better man for her. It is amusing, because Covino and Marvin—as both writers and actors—have a thorough understanding of their characters. That's especially true of the two men's way of basically saying whatever they need to in the moment, in the hopes that it'll get them what they want—even if it contradicts what they just said or about to say.

There are decent gags here, too, such as what happens—or, more accurately, doesn't quite happen—between Paul and Ashley, as well as how Paul and Julie's troublemaking son Russ (Simon Webster) has learned quite a bit from his father and the surrogate father Carey tries to be. A climactic party is surely a highlight. It subtly sets up disasters to come, pays them off when we least expect them, and even has a mentalist (played by Nicholas Braun) who appears to genuinely be able to read minds.

Johnson and Arjona are strong presences in Splitsville, to be sure, but that only emphasizes how underwritten and underutilized their characters actually are in a story that, in a way, really revolves around them, their desires, their needs, and their feelings about these two guys. If the movie had sincerely recognized that and proceeded accordingly, it might have been more than a series of good jokes.

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