FILM OF THE WEEK: Splitsville - Reviewed by Roe McDermott

It’s not a good week for polyamory. In the States, feminist Lindy West’s memoir Adult Braces has sparked intense discourse around whether her move into polyamory was coercive, harmful, or shaped by low self-esteem and white guilt, while agenda-driven columnists have been quick to declare that the book signals - *checks notes and the dozens of opinion pieces written about it* - the death of polyamory, millennial feminism, queerness, neurodivergence and believing women, apparently. The power of the written word, eh? Meanwhile, The Bachelorette, a pageantry of monogamy that somehow unfolds through one person dating dozens of suitors, has been caught up in its own controversy, after it emerged that the central figure had a history of domestic violence known to her co-stars on The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, a show about a religion that famously allowed polygamy for men, not women, and which then revealed a culture of “soft swinging” among its featured couples, prompting predictable scandal.

Now, does every affair or scandal involving a monogamous person signal the death knell of monogamy? Of course not. Monogamy has never been so fragile that a single scandal, or even several, could undo it. People have always cheated, always strayed, always found ways to both uphold and undermine the relationships they claim to believe in, and the institution has endured, reshaped rather than replaced each time it comes under scrutiny. What feels different now is not the existence of betrayal, but the scale and intensity of how it is discussed, picked apart, moralised and folded into a broader anxiety about what relationships should look like, and who gets to define them.

We are in a moment where the language of therapy, self-actualisation and personal freedom has collided with older expectations around commitment, stability and care, creating a strange hybrid. People are encouraged to pursue authenticity, but are still judged for where that pursuit leads them. Dating apps offer endless choice while flattening the meaning of that choice, social media turns private relationships into public content, and a generation raised on independence is now navigating the realities of building a life with someone else under economic and cultural pressures that often pull in opposite directions. Marriage and birth rates are down, women are opting about of partnerships with men while men declare that sex with women is the only cure to their loneliness, and the result is a low, persistent uncertainty, a sense that the rules have shifted without anyone agreeing on what has replaced them.

That uncertainty gives disproportionate weight to individual stories, whether memoir, reality TV scandal or viral confession, each one treated as proof of something larger than it can reasonably carry. Polyamory becomes either a solution or a warning, monogamy either outdated or essential, while most people sit somewhere in between, trying and often failing to make intimacy work on their own terms. The question is less whether monogamy is ending, than why we are so keen to announce its end, and what that reveals about the pressures shaping relationships now.

Into this comes Splitsville, a film where a break in the monogamy contract sets off a chain reaction. It opens with Carey (Kyle Marvin), a mild-mannered gym teacher, and his wife Ashley (Adria Arjona) mid-drive, mid-argument, and mid-ill-advised attempt to inject some excitement into a marriage that has already curdled after fourteen months, the scene quickly spiralling into police and paramedic-riddled chaos before landing on Ashley’s blunt admission that she has been cheating freely and wants out. Without giving anything away about the bold opener, writer-director-actor Michael Angelo Corvino and bestie-writer-star Marvin immediately dive into aggressive, dark screwball action, marking a film every knock to a male characters’ fragile ego, relationship, or sense of emotional safety is marked by violence on either another human or property – but you know, in a fun way.

After Ashley’s confession of infidelity, Carey retreats to the beachside home of his best friend Paul (Corvino) and Paul’s wife Julie (Dakota Johnson), a couple who present their open marriage as both practical arrangement and lifestyle choice - all glass walls, expensive taste and carefully managed transgression.

The central rupture arrives when Carey, taking this arrangement at face value, sleeps with Julie and then tells Paul, only to trigger a reaction that is anything but measured. What follows is one of the film’s standout sequences, a prolonged, tightly choreographed brawl through a Hamptons home as the two men clumsily scrap their way through it, like a cross-over between Mark Darcy and Daniel Cleaver and Mr and Mrs. Smith. It’s ridiculous and fun and somewhat charming, as pauses are taken, household pets are valiantly saved, and safety rules are intuited. (“No knives!” the men unanimously declare, happy to inflict some harm on each other in the realm of emotions, fists and home furnishings, but not willing to do any lasting damage.) The tone is set here, somewhere between screwball farce and something sharper, where emotional injury is repeatedly translated into physical damage.

From there, the film expands to follow both couples as they attempt to rearrange themselves in the aftermath, with Paul and Julie navigating the aftershocks not only of her dalliance with Carey, but of Paul’s secret financial difficulties and their son’s increasing attempt to get their attention through juvenile delinquency.

Paul and Carey sit at the centre of this, two versions of masculinity that shape the film’s subplots. Paul works in “the city” making high-end property deals and likes to brag about spending $25,000 on a rug in his Hampton’s home. He’s secretive, emotionally disconnected, and tells his son “Deny deny deny” when they end up in the principal’s office, like Roy Cohn to a grade-school Trump. His posturing is of course later revealed to be concealing a marshmallowy centre, but Carey is all marshmallow from the get-go -eager to please, eager to believe, and frequently out of his depth. Their dynamic drives much of the film’s movement, with Paul’s secrecy and business dealings sending shockwaves through his family, while Carey becomes the most congenial of cuckolds, forming easy friendships with Ashley’s lovers, who linger more for his warmth than for her.

There is real pleasure in the film’s staging, particularly in its commitment to physical comedy and clear visual space, with extended takes that allow gags to unfold naturally. The fight scene is a joy, as is a montage of Ashley’s lovers moving through her home, hobbies and bedroom only to invariably end up hanging out with Carey, and it acts as a fun piece of physical and emotional choreography.

Still, the comedy often curdles, largely because none of these characters are especially likeable, their selfishness and evasiveness building until it becomes difficult to invest in where they end up. The female characters aren’t well served, functioning more as catalysts than fully realised figures. Dakota Johnson comes out the best, moving from Fifty Shades to Materialists to this, continuing to circle questions of money, sex and monogamy, and exploring modern relationships through a lens of beautiful hair, languorous speech patterns and sophisticated detachment. She plays Julie with a cool restraint that feels slightly removed from the chaos, while Ashley is given moments of agency that never quite develop into something fuller, leaving the film circling male anxiety more than it interrogates the dynamics it sets up.

What Splitsville seems to be reaching for is a satire of contemporary relationships, exploring how openness, honesty and self-knowledge can become scripts in their own right, performed without much clarity about what people actually want. Ashley being a life coach is a repeated source of derision, and characters’ repeatedly parrot that divorce is only complicated if you have money or kids, falling into transactional platitudes to quiet the existential crisis of it all.

But there is also a more conservative current running through it, a suggestion that not only do deeply mediocre men, as long as they’re not heinous, deserve stunningly beautiful, professionally successful, self-realised women (it’s the Judd Apatow playbook all over again), but also that all this experimentation inevitably leads back to familiar structures, and that way lies safety.

Splitsville is often funny, occasionally inventive, and sharp in places about the gap between how people talk about relationships and how they live them, but it rarely settles long enough to deepen those ideas. By the end, as the characters land wherever they are going to land, the overriding sense is of a film that keeps moving to avoid asking what any of it really means.

Directed by Michael Angelo Covino. Written by Michael Angelo Covino, Kyle Marvin. Cinematography by Adam Newport-Berra. Edited by Sara Shaw. Music by Dabney Morris, David Wingo.

Starring Kyle Marvin, Dakota Johnson, Adria Arjona, Michael Angelo Covino, Nicholas Braun, Charlie Gillespie, Simon Webster. 104 mins

• In cinemas now.