Karlovy Vary 2025 Review: SPLITSVILLE, (B)Rom-Com Gets a Manic Jolt to the System

The romantic comedy has long passed its heyday and now exists largely in a state of clinical coma.

Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin resuscitate the genre for a new era in their latest collaboration, Splitsville. Co-written by and co-starring Covino and Marvin, with Covino directing, Splitsville begins with a deceptively simple premisea man turns to his best friend for support after his wife asks for a divorce, but gradually develops into a portrait of fractured relationships and reluctant emotional growth.

The film opens with one of the more absurd comic sequences in recent memory, fully embracing its chaotic tone that will come to define Splitsville. Carey (Marvin) and his wife Ashley (Adria Arjona) are en route to a beach house, the atmosphere reeking of a belated honeymoon.

Within minutes, a surreal car accident segues into Ashley, a life coach, announcing her infidelity and requesting a divorce. Carey spirals into panic, running across open fields until he arrives at the home of his best friend Paul (Covino) and Paul’s wife Julie (Dakota Johnson).

As Carey recounts his imploding marriage, he discovers Ashley has already updated them. That evening, over wine, Paul and Julie reveal that their own marriage has been sustained by an open relationship, an idea that piques Carey’s curiosity.

As the title suggests, Splitsville centers on shifting configurations of decoupling and recoupling, around its central characters. Carey begins to test the boundaries of Paul and Julie’s open marriage while simultaneously navigating the revolving door of new boyfriends living temporarily with Ashley in the apartment they still share in their pre-divorce period. Splitsville  turns into a marriage comedy of errors that straddles the space between “life just happens” and “people make dumb choices.”

Covino and Marvin draw only loosely from rom-com conventions, even as they selectively employ some of the genre’s familiar beats. What distinguishes Splitsville is its manic comic energy, blending sitcom-style dialogue with slapstick and visual gags that often operate in the background. Covino’s deadpan delivery contrasts sharply with Marvin’s portrayal of Carey, whose shift from sad sack to man-child naïve avoids masculine toxicity in favor of playful absurdity.

Despite strong comic turns from Arjona’s promiscuous life coach and Johnson’s stoic housewife, both characters are ultimately secondary to what is, at its core, a bro-com wrapped in the shell of a marriage comedy. Johnson’s Julie emerges as a rational counterweight and drives the narrative’s second act, yet the film’s comedic momentum remains firmly in male hands.

At one point, Covino's Paul breaks into a wrestling-like fight with Carey after a nonchalant breakfast confession involving Paul’s wife. The theatrical furniture-breaking, with all sorts of piledrives and suplexes, brings out the quintessential masculine physical comedy.

Splitsville continues the thematic terrain explored in Covino’s earlier feature, The Climb. While that film established Covino and Marvin as chroniclers of bittersweet male friendship within the buddy movie format, Splitsville pushes their sensibility into more anarchic, genre-blurring territory.

If The Climb focused on the subtle tensions of a co-dependent relationship over time, Splitsville broadens its scope to examine marriage cohabitation, open arrangements, and the emotional confusion of contemporary domestic life. Both films share Covino’s taste for physical absurdity and deadpan humor, though Splitsville heightens these elements through a faster-paced, sitcom-inflected rhythm and an unapologetically farcical tone.

Filtered through the lens of its two male creators, Splitsville presents a romantic (or rather, marital) comedy steeped in the male gaze. Its humor leans toward the testosterone-fueled, with verbal and physical comedy revolving around raunchy dialogue, sexual anxiety, and moments that border on Jackass-style mayhem.

The film’s genre identity ultimately aligns more closely with the bromance than the rom-com, even as it navigates themes of marriage and romantic misadventures. Covino and Marvin rely heavily on sitcom pacing and structure, ensuring a steady cadence of gags, particularly in the final act, when they fully embrace the comic excess.

In reframing the romantic comedy as a vehicle for male emotional reckoning, Splitsville ultimately locates its energy less in reconciliation than in the performance of chaos. Covino and Marvin lean into the contradictions of modern masculinity. The result is a comedy that probes the limits of male vulnerability in what has been so far the funniest film of the year.

Neon will release Splitsville in U.S. theaters on August 22. Visit the official site for more information.