Fans of the prosthetic penis will like Splitsville. For the rest of us there’s smart writing and a farcical plot aiming at… I have no idea… modern relationships? Is this really how people behave? I doubt it. Shorthand – it’s Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice meets The Break-Up (the one starring Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston as an estranged couple sharing an apartment).
The basic set-up is that Carey (Kyle Marvin) and Ashley (Adria Arjona) are a married couple who split up suddenly when she decides she can do better than this deadbeat. She’s also hotter than him by an order of magnitude – Arjona is hotter than almost everybody – so he, long story short, takes comfort by sleeping with Julie (Dakota Johnson), the wife of his friend Paul (Michael Angel Covino). Paul and Julie are rich and clever and they have an open marriage, so it’s OK.
Of course it isn’t. That’s where the examination of modern relationships bit comes in, as Paul takes violent exception to a development in an arrangement that had been working very well – for him more than her, it seems. The fact that Carey has a massive cock, which at this point we’ve seen several times, may partly explain Paul’s irritation. In the film’s best scene by a stretch, Paul and Carey beat the living shit out of each other after Carey tells Paul what’s been going on – a fight that’s done for real apparently. It’s scrappy and long-winded and oafish and painful and both men end up exhausted. Very funny.
In the meantime, Ashley has taken up with the first of several guys from the top shelf of masculinity: one works for Doctors Without Borders, another is insanely ripped. And in a plot development out of The Break-Up, Carey winds up moving back in with her, because it’s his place too and he has nowhere else to go. So there are menage à trois vibes too, in which Carey becomes something of a father confessor figure to all the various gentlemen attendant on his good lady wife.
Writers/directors/stars Marvin and Covino shuffle all those bits around into different configurations, leaving us to guess who it’s going to work out well for in the end. If any of them. It is essential in farces of this sort that we actually like the characters we’re watching, or at least are fascinated by them. This is perilously close to not being the case here – Carey is wet, Ashley is a bitch, Paul is self-centred and Julie is entitled, the Karen of a zillion YouTube clips.
There isn’t much in the way of development either. What’s more, is it not strange that Nicholas Braun, the dweeby Machiavelli in Succession, gets the best laugh as a children’s entertainer performing a shockingly bad visual gag/trick for some under-appreciative kids?
Marvin and Covino are something of a two-man production outfit but, in acting terms, an unknown quantity to me. They throw themselves into it wholeheartedly, possibly aware that Johnson and Arjona are where the eyes are going to be. As for the ladies, Johnson is now in choppy, Kate Hudson-esque waters, and, to switch genders, may be wandering too far up McConaughey Avenue pre the McConaissance – light entertainment is not where the kudos is, hard though it is to do well. Arjona gets the short straw, underused but relentlessly good.
Relationships, the moral seems to be, are best not messed with. Don’t cut corners, don’t get cute or clever and they’ll be fine. Not earth-shattering, maybe, but re-assuring, and helping to fizz up the last third of the film, when the sense of wheels spinning is suddenly overtaken by the need to wrap things up. Things ends nicely and even tidily, for the audience at least.
Splitsville – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
