The Climb

The debut feature of the team behind the 2025 comedy Splitsville shares a lot of the same DNA with that hilarious take on navigating contemporary relationships. Like Splitsville, The Climb stars co-writer/co-producers Michael Angelo Covino and Kyle Marvin as dysfunctional best friends trying to find happiness in a world that's a little too complicated for their lackadaisical minds to comprehend fully. It is similarly broken into several chapters covering different points in the characters' early middle age/extended adolescence, with many sequences unfolding in long, choreographed shots. These stylistic choices are more overt in The Climb, where the chapters often mark significant ellipses in time and in which nearly every scene is covered in unbroken, or what's meant to appear as unbroken, takes. I've always been a sucker for this cinematic gimmick, provided the long takes are well executed and serve the narrative, as they do here.

The story follows the minor ups and severe downs of a toxic bromance between two high school buddies, a dickish former jock named Mike (Covino, who also directs) and his shlubby, overly accommodating, nice guy pal, Kyle (Marvin). Over the course of several years, we witness Mike betray Kyle over and over, and the needy Kyle forgiving him and taking him back into his life. Nearly all of these ups and downs occur off-screen, enabling the film to delight us with the moments of confession, reaction, and outcome. This never gets dull because it's left to us to fill in the missing pieces, guessing at what has transpired between each time we reconnect with these folks. Both actors are extremely funny, and while the ultimate resolution is never in doubt, we never know exactly how each scene will unfold. Splitsville is more masterful in its unpredictability, but The Climb slyly invites you to anticipate several events that do happen but don't play out as you might expect.

The supporting cast features faces you know you've seen before but won't always recognizes, like Gayle Rankin (The Greatest Showman, Her Smell, Blow the Man Down, and the Netflix series GLOW) as Kyle's former high school girlfreind and current fiancee whom none of his friends or family like, Talia Balsam (No Strings Attached, Worth, The Many Saints of Newark, and several TV series) as Kyle's mother, and George Wendt (of Cheers fame) as Kyle's grandfather. The cinemtography by Zach Kuperstein (who would go on to shoot Barbarian and Woman of the Hour) is impressive, especially considering how often the long steadicam shots move from differently lit rooms through out the various sequences. What's truly special, though, is how well all these long takes serve the comedy of each situation, rather than come off like a director showing off. In fact, since the director is in nearly all of these shots, we never feel a filmmaker's hand guiding the scenes.

Each sequence is so well conceived that we get instantly swept up in what's going on with all the characters, each moment we're introduced or reintroduced to them. And the constantly moving camera seems to know implicitly when it will be funniest to be in a close-up and when letting things play out in an extreme long shot will make the action ten times more comical and pointed. These filmmakers truly understand visual language and how to be funny within a frame as well as on a page. They also find a lot more nuance exploring the complexities of male friendship than the myriad raunchy yet saccharine comedies about male bonding that followed the success of The Forty-Year-Old Virgin. The Climb may not be as rich, textured, or as constantly funny as Splitsville, but it's a damn good first feature. I can't wait to see what these guys do next.