Review: 'Splitsville' Exemplifies Luxury Beliefs on Polyamory

It probably shouldn’t be surprising that 2025 would feature a major movie release with big Hollywood stars about open relationships. Acceptance and endorsement of open marriages, polyamory, and generally looser marriage arrangements—particularly among the wealthy and educated—have been on the rise, as discussed in pieces like The New Yorker’s How Did Polyamory Become So Popular, and The Atlantic’s Polyamory, the Ruling Class’s Latest Fad. It was only a matter of time before it showed up in the forefront of mainstream movies as well.

The semi-indie studio Neon answers that call with Splitsville, released in select theaters on August 22nd and widely released on September 5th. Starring Dakota Johnson, Adria Arjona, Kyle Marvin, and Michael Angelo Covino, Splitsville follows two couples whose friendship erupts into conflict when the husband of the divorcing couple sleeps with the wife of the open marriage couple (alert, spoilers ahead). When Ashley (Arjona) demands a divorce from her husband, Carey (Marvin), he runs to his friends Paul (Covino) and Julie (Johnson) for support. He’s shocked to learn from them that the “secret” to their happy marriage is an open relationship. But when Carey sleeps with Julie, Paul can’t take it, and all of their lives spiral into chaos.

Before watching the film, I expected to it to be fairly pro-open relationship. This is Hollywood, after all. While I was mostly right, there is actually quite a lot more in the film that is critical of the practice than I expected—much of which fits with the research we have on marital health and stability.

The majority of Splitsville surprisingly functions as a rather quasi-conservative takedown of modern elites' acceptance of loosened marital mores. Ashley’s decision to leave Carey to “find herself” is what throws everyone’s relationships into turmoil. Paul’s insistence that he and Julie have an open relationship is what makes her unhappy enough to sleep with their friend, Carey. Which leads to the fracturing of everyone’s relationships because neither Paul, nor Julie, nor Carey can be as chill about the affair as they claimed they could be. 

This has always been the case about polyamory made by pro-marriage advocates. While some studies say that couples in open or non-traditional marriages are just as happy as traditional ones, these relationships are less stable. Jealousy and the desire to break up and pair off with one of the partners is a much bigger possibility, as Rosemary L. Hopcroft noted on these pages.

And despite protests by the non-monogamy advocates, pair bonding appears to be cross-cultural. The late Dr. Helen Fisher pointed out in her book The Anatomy of Love that the vast majority of people throughout history have not been polygamous but serially monogamous. Couples would pair bond until at least their third or fourth year, when sometimes they would break up and pair bond with someone else. 

Many societies allowed polygamy, but it was not the most widely practiced arrangement. It was largely only widespread in contexts where a) a minority of men had the majority of the wealth and b) a majority of men were dead from war. In other words, polygamy existed largely in unnatural (and unhealthy) contexts. In fact, as Professor Samuel Wilkinson pointed out at IFS, jealousy-based violence against romantic partners and potential “mate poachers” is a top source of one-on-one homicide worldwide with deep roots in our evolutionary history.  Where modern cult leaders tried to create idyllic polyamorous societies, these typically ended in a bloodbath by jealous men—something humorously depicted in Splitsville as Carey and Paul battle throughout Paul’s house.

And this is actually the source of the majority of the comedy in Splitsville: laughing at the hypocrisy of people who claim to be more sophisticated than the pro-traditional-marriage rubes but end up being just as jealous (and human) as anyone else. We laugh because their lives fall apart in chaotic ways as they tie themselves into increasingly absurd knots rather than admit that monogamy is the better way to go.

In many ways, Splitsville is a great example of “luxury beliefs,” a phrase coined by culture critic Rob Henderson to describe beliefs advocated by society’s elites that raise the status of the privileged while incurring costs on the less fortunate. This applies to polyamory because—as IFS contributor Kay Hymowitz has pointed out—it’s much easier to be polyamorous when you’re rich. When discussing the polyamorous lifestyle of Molly Rodon Winter, Hymowitz pointed out how much above-average organizational skills and emotional intelligence it requires to manage multiple partners and make sure everyone feels cared for and respected. It also takes a lot of money. As Hymowitz noted:  

Winter and her husband have purchased and renovated a Park Slope brownstone that, by definition, makes her a wealthy woman. She doesn’t appear to think twice about paying for babysitters, Ubers, hotels, seductive foreplay dinners, therapists, and medical care (her athletic sex life has led to a series of urinary tract infections). 

The instability of open relationships requires other forms of above-average stability to maintain them. This is the opposite of how marriage advocates see marriage: as an institution that should be the source of stability that other things (like wealth) can be built on, rather than the reverse. We see this reflected in Splitsville as well. Paul and Julie can maintain their open relationship when they are financially stable. But once they lose everything, Julie runs to Carey, who offers exclusivity and faithful parental investment for her son.  

The fantasy at the end of Splitsville is the ultimate expression of a luxury belief: that my choices won’t have consequences that hurt others.

There is another piece to the elite’s relationship to “luxury beliefs” around open relationships that’s reflected in Splitsville. As Brad Wilcox pointed out in his Atlantic essay, The Awfulness of Elite Hypocrisy on Marriage, most members of the elite class are actually more likely than average to have traditional monogamous marriages, to stay married, and have children who follow their example. They advocate for the non-traditional model for others but don’t engage in it themselves. 

Likewise, in Splitsville, Paul admits he’s never actually slept with anyone else as part of the couple’s open relationship—nor did he have any desire to do so. He only opened the marriage up because he was insecure that his wife would leave him for someone else, so he said she could sleep with whoever she wanted to (as long as she stayed). 

Unfortunately, this “elite hypocrisy on marriage” infects the film as well. At the end of Splitsville, Paul, Julie, Ashley, and Carey all move in together to form one big (seemingly polyamorous) “happy” family. Somehow, after all the chaos that their dalliances caused, this time, everyone is expected to stay cool. 

Not only is this scenario unlikely to work in reality, but it also isn’t earned in the film. The previous scene featured the explosion of chaos as the couples switched back to their original partners again. They–once again–couldn’t deny that their original bonds had deep roots. There is no shift, no explanation, no catharsis that leads us to believe that this time, their progressive values will hold. Yet we are supposed to accept that they will.

This changes the satire of the film from making fun of those who dismiss marital faithfulness to those who are too “weak” to rise above it. Instead of laughing at Paul for thinking he can rise above his right and natural desire for exclusivity with his wife, we’re supposed to have been laughing at Paul for not being able to rise above these feelings. Instead of being moved by Carey’s constant desire to be faithful to whatever woman he’s with—whether it’s Ashley or Julie—we are supposed to see that as small and pitiful. And yet, that’s not how those moments read when we watch them. 

This, then, is the kind of moral rot at the heart of Splitsville: it wants us to think that our attachment to commitment and faithfulness is what’s wrong with us rather than our unfaithfulness. It’s the same kind of thing that hookup culture did, where it took people developing feelings for those they had casual sex with and reinterpreted these as a disease: “catching feelings.”

The truthfulness of the rest of the film is replaced with a fantasy. And that fantasy is no more apparent than in how they handle Rus, Paul and Julie’s child. Rus is often a casualty of the conflicts between the parents. He is sometimes ignored, sometimes engaged with and helped by the parents (and Carey), and sometimes treated as a pawn (such as when his birthday party is part of Paul’s strategy to get back with Julie). But in all of it—particularly at the end—Rus is portrayed as unaffected by the chaos of his parental figures' sexual inconsistency. 

This is also something we know is not true. In Wilcox’s previously mentioned Atlantic piece, he points out that the research shows pretty definitively that children are harmed when they aren’t raised in a stable family, ideally with their two married biological parents. Polyamory is likely to increase instability for children born or brought into these relationships. 

The fantasy, then, at the end of Splitsville is the ultimate expression of a luxury belief: that my choices won’t have consequences that hurt others. This may be why people who would never be in open relationships themselves still say they support the idea. Because they have plenty of things they do want to believe they can do and pretend it doesn’t hurt anyone. And if it can be true for open relationships, it can be true for them. The only price is turning a blind eye to those you hurt, and there’s no greater luxury than that.

Joseph Holmes is an NYC-based film and culture critic. He's written for outlets such as Forbes, The New York Times, Christianity Today, World Magazine, Religion Unplugged, Relevant, and Religion & Liberty. He co-hosts a weekly podcast called The Overthinkers. 

Photo credit: Neon