Tom Cruise has shown off some insane stunts here in Cannes, with the world premiere of Mission Impossible—The Final Reckoning. But he may meet his match in Splitsville, the absurdist indie sex comedy made for a tiny fraction of that behemoth’s budget. The new film starring Michael Angelo Covino, also its director, and Kyle Marvin, its cowriter and producer, features some outrageous set pieces made using practical effects. There’s a terrifying car crash; one or both of these guys (“no spoilers,” they urge) really do fall through a giant glass window onto a grassy lawn, oozing blood.
“Mike is bleeding from his head, and our stunt coordinator comes over and is like, ‘This is the best-case scenario,’” Marvin tells me between sips of his Noisette on a Cannes restaurant patio. “We were, like, ‘Wait, wait, wait. What was the worst-case scenario?’”
This may not sound like typical Cannes fare, but Covino and Martin bring a classic Euro-cinema flair to their deeply American—sometimes, deeply silly—character studies. Their previous collaboration, the moving friendship dramedy The Climb, premiered in the festival’s Un Certain Regard section and won a special jury prize. Splitsville, which Neon is set to release in August in the US, will launch in the Premiere program on Monday.
Covino and Martin’s new film opens on spouses Ashley (Adria Arjona) and Carey (Marvin), who are heading out of the city to meet their couple friends Julie (Dakota Johnson) and Paul (Covino) at their stunning new beach house. They’ve barely started the engine before Ashley announces she wants a divorce. Carey gets out of the car and makes his own way to Julie and Paul’s, where they discuss the news; during this conversation, he learns that Julie and Paul are in an open relationship. The discovery of this dynamic—its freedom, its pitfalls—opens both Carey’s and Ashley’s minds, just as it’s presenting fresh challenges to Julie and Paul’s marriage. Before long, all hell breaks loose.
“It’s a bunch of people who are convincing themselves that they’ve figured it all out, only to go back to their childlike impulses,” Covino says. “We know people where it’s just a conversation right now, this lifestyle. You realize, ‘Oh, no, I’m jealous. I still have these feelings. And this is the way they’re going to come out.’” The film neither condemns nor endorses an open-marriage approach. “It’s very human,” Covino says of how Splitsville examines the topic. “You look in some people’s eyes and they’re, like, ‘Yeah, we’re really happy about it.’ Then it’s, like, ‘Fuck, there’s sadness under there.’”
How does this nuanced understanding of an intimate topic lead to bloody scalps? “You’re trying to make a movie that’s, in our minds, a reinvigoration of classic farces—old Italian sex comedies, and the Blake Edwards and Arthur Hiller movies,” Covino says. Marvin, who made his feature directorial debut with 2023’s 80 for Brady, adds, “As an audience member, we’re just, like, ‘What a crazy choice—but made with such confidence and such craft.’ That was really the bar.’”
“You watch movies like Seduced and Abandoned, or Lina Wertmüller movies—the audacity of the decisions that the characters make—you just go, ‘What the fuck are they doing?’” Covino continues. “You watch contemporary things, and the character would never do that. But people do these things. People are fucking nuts.”
After the success of The Climb, Covino and Marvin tried to get a bigger-ticket theatrical comedy budgeted around $30 million off the ground—the kind of movie Hollywood basically never invests in anymore. The duo knew they needed to pivot, and landed on Splitsville as the sort of big-screen event producible at a modest price. Neon boarded the project early, and Dakota Johnson, who’d previously expressed interest in working with the pair, came on last-minute after another actor dropped out. Johnson’s a full producer on the film as well.
“We’re getting smarter and we’re getting better,” Marvin says of navigating the business as indie filmmakers. Still, they had some stressful nonnegotiables. For starters, Covino committed to shooting on film, an expense that forced them to cut six days of shooting. “Shooting on film is sort of like planting a flag,” Covino says. “Every time we roll the camera, you’re lighting money on fire. It sets a tone. It’s a bit more methodical, and you have to be more intentional.” It’s also a trade-off: “To be very honest, the movie would be a lot better if I had those extra days.”
That decision left no margin for error, even during the most elaborate of sequences. The aforementioned car crash, which happens early in the movie, was captured in a single take at the last possible minute. “We had to weave in and out of traffic because we had all these other stunt drivers on the road,” Covino says. “The camera pans around, covers the car, goes around, watches the crash, and comes back and lands.” Before that, Covino and Martin filmed a wild fight scene that runs for about 10 minutes in the movie. Again, it’s real, and again, they had virtually no time—they blocked it out before shooting the rest of Splitsville.
“We had three days of just beating the shit out of each other before we started day one, and we were all bruised up,” Covino says. For Marvin, this was a problem since he had to shoot some nude scenes later. “They had to spray my body because I was bruised everywhere. My chest was purple. They were constantly trying to cover the bruises for two weeks.” This level of commitment is visibly, almost worryingly evident in the film—and that’s equally true of the extreme choices made by Johnson and Arjona’s characters.
