Splitsville 2025 Parents Guide

Splitsville is Rated R by Motion Picture Rating (MPA) for language throughout, sexual content and graphic nudity.

Splitsville – Movie Review 2025

Desire, as Splitsville would have it, isn’t just messy it’s the surest way to set fire to every relationship in the vicinity. Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin’s follow-up to their 2019 bromance The Climb is a romantic comedy with a taste for self-destruction, gleefully dismantling its quartet of entangled nitwits before trying, with mixed results, to glue them back together. The fun is in watching just how much damage they do along the way.

(The film opens in select theaters on August 22 and expands nationwide September 5, because apparently chaos deserves a wide release.)

Covino and Marvin, paired with Dakota Johnson and Adriana Arjona, turn in a fast, funny autopsy of modern coupling a kind of slapstick relationship morgue. “You never really know what something’s worth until you sink it,” a kid announces at the end, and while he’s technically talking about jet skis, it’s hard not to hear it as the film’s blunt thesis on marriage.

Said kid, Rus (Simon Webster), spends his summer joyriding stolen jet skis and gleefully ramming them into the bottom of the lake. His parents, Julie (Johnson), a sensitive potter, and Paul (Covino), a real estate shark, aren’t exactly beacons of stability either. Into this swamp of dysfunction drive Carey (Marvin) and Ashley (Arjona), who kick off their road trip with cheery singalongs before swerving into one of the most ill-timed highway hand jobs in movie history. The result: a flipped SUV, a dead passenger, and Ashley gamely performing CPR like she’s auditioning for a very dark parody of Grey’s Anatomy. It’s here that Splitsville lays down its central point with admirable bluntness: lust kills sometimes literally.

Ashley, never one to dwell, follows the accident with a casual double-whammy: she wants a divorce, and she’s been sleeping around for weeks. Carey, gutted, abandons his car and stumbles through swamps and forests until he reaches Julie and Paul’s lake house, the picture of tragicomic heartbreak. His friends, eager to console, cheerfully confess that their marriage is “open,” which Carey hears as both horrifying and faintly ludicrous. But since he’s already halfway down the spiral, why not go all in? Soon enough he’s making out with Julie, first as a jab at Paul, then because well, because she’s there.

Paul, of course, isn’t nearly as enlightened as his free-love rhetoric suggests. The moment Carey comes clean, Paul responds not with zen but with a living-room brawl for the ages: punches, kicks, fire pokers, even a fish tank collapse that would make Tom & Jerry proud. Covino shoots the fight in long takes that emphasize not their toughness but their pathetic wheezing. By the time they’ve tumbled out a second-story window into the pool, these two look less like warriors than overgrown toddlers in timeout.

Carey slinks back home only to find Ashley mid-fling with her new boy toy Jackson (Charlie Gillespie). In what might be the film’s funniest sequence, Carey simply refuses to move out. Covino’s camera spins through a montage of Ashley’s lovers cycling in and out of the bedroom while Carey sits gloomily in the kitchen, a sad ghost haunting his own apartment. The kicker? Once Ashley’s conquests get dumped, they stick around to commiserate with Carey. It’s a support group nobody asked for, least of all Ashley.

Meanwhile, Julie’s marriage to Paul is imploding under the weight of his shady business deals fraud, embezzlement, take your pick. This leaves her vulnerable, and Carey, still nursing his bruises, is more than happy to fill the vacancy. Cue another affair, another round of petty jealousy, and Paul realizing that he’s basically become Carey, watching helplessly as his ex takes up with someone else. The difference: this time, it’s his best friend.

The themes here fidelity versus selfishness, lust versus loyalty are ancient as cinema itself, but Splitsville dresses them up in modern absurdity and delivers them with a wink. Covino and Marvin’s bickering feels lived-in, Arjona throws herself into comic chaos (her late-film belting of a Fray ballad is both mortifying and hilarious), and Johnson plays Julie with just enough wounded charm to make her tug-of-war between men feel more than a sitcom setup. Carey, a bumbling gym teacher, is part puppy dog, part idiot, which makes him weirdly endearing despite his poor judgment.

Hovering around all this adult mayhem is Rus, whose teenage rebellion only adds more kindling to the fire. By the time Nicholas Braun wanders into the movie as Ashley’s mentalist boyfriend, Splitsville has embraced full-blown lunacy, piling on absurdity with the gusto of a farce that refuses to end quietly.

None of this is shocking anyone could guess where these messy entanglements lead. What makes Splitsville sing is Covino and Marvin’s knack for writing scenes that are simultaneously ridiculous and bruisingly real. Unlike Dakota Johnson’s other summer romance, Materialists, which took a glossier, airbrushed route, this one revels in the grubby comedy of human folly. It’s part date movie, part cautionary tale, and part reminder that sometimes the funniest disasters are the ones we bring entirely on ourselves. Covino and Marvin shouldn’t wait another six years before blowing up another set of relationships on screen.

Splitsville 2025 Parents Guide

Violence & Scares: Let’s not mince words: This isn’t a nuking flick, but it’s a physical roast of the soul. We get relentless fistfights think slaps, full-nelsons, flailing to the point where one squirted face ends up in a pot of water. A car flips. A person dies. Objects get smashed like they owe rent fish tanks, walls chaos everywhere. Blood? Minimal. Feelings? Bruised like a watermelon. Not for tiny horror fans, but not a battlefield cartoon either.

Language:  Jesus, lace up your finest earplugs. We’re drowning in expletives: every shade of f-k, sh-t, the c-t that walks into the room, “motherf–r,” “goddamn,” “oh my God” you name it, they say it. It’s constant, unapologetic, obligatory. In other words: R-rated language seasoning from opening to closing credits.

Sexual Content & Nudity: Where to start? Imagine hand jobs in moving cars, a parade of hookups, open marriage vaudeville, and yes full-frontal and rear nudity. Male AND female. And dialogue that wouldn’t pass your grandmother’s eardrums. This is sex played loud, proud, awkward, and unapologetic.

Substance Use / Drugs: Okay, not everything’s a dumpster fire. There’s a smidge of casual drinking nothing heroic, no narcotics. Adults sip whiskey or wine while dismantling their marriages, not their livers. No fake glamorization of party culture. They’re too busy unapologetically betraying each other to chase liquor bottle arcs.

Final Takedown (because you and I both know we want it)

Kiddos, run the other way. This is prime adult territory—Splitsville is practically a relationship self-immolation tutorial dipped in expletives and nudity. The violence is more bruise than battlefield; the humor is gonzo adult chaos. It understands how messy, self-sabotaging, loud adult love can be and doesn’t bother petting the edges.