There’s an easy pitch to Celine Song’s latest film Materialists: imagine a contemporary New York screwball romance, part Working Girl hustle, part When Harry Met Sally walk-and-talk. Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is our entry point, a high-end matchmaker at an elite firm called Adore, tasked with brokering relationships like a broker flips condos. And if Lucy is a matchmaker, she’s also, as one of her clients bitterly points out, a kind of pimp—brokering intimacy, sometimes at the expense of her clients’ safety.
The setup suggests a sharp, funny critique of how romance and capitalism have fused in modern city life. But as I watched, I couldn’t shake the sense that Song was circling something compelling without quite seizing it. The film wants to be witty, biting, heartfelt, and bruising all at once—and in trying to juggle those tones, it rarely lands cleanly.
A Voluntary Celibate Meets Her Match
Song, who made her feature debut with the transcendent Past Lives, has moved here from wistful metaphysics to material concerns. Where her first film lingered in silence and yearning, Materialists leans on declarations, list-making, and sharp dialogue.
Lucy’s job at Adore provides the film’s scaffolding. She curates wealthy clients’ romantic futures like one might arrange résumés, pairing men with “suitable” women whose attributes look good on paper. The business thrives on a New York that prizes ambition, appearances, and connections—until cracks appear. Sophie (Zoë Winters), Lucy’s longtime client, grows disillusioned with the constant turnover of dates and, more gravely, becomes entangled with a man who poses real danger. This subplot unfolds like a reminder of the hazards baked into commodified intimacy: trauma reduced to legal disputes and NDAs.
Outside the office, Lucy’s personal life proves just as complicated. She’s still tethered to John (Chris Evans), a former flame with little more than charisma and a stack of unpaid bills, even as Harry (Pedro Pascal), a private equity millionaire nursing his own insecurities, represents the comfortable alternative. Their push-and-pull gives the film its romantic triangle, though Song seems less interested in suspense than in laying bare what each option represents: survival, stability, or the faint possibility of love.
‘Materialists’: A Closer Look into Dating in the Digital Age
There’s a lot here worth admiring. Song understands the fatigue of dating in the digital age, even if her stand-in is a boutique company rather than Tinder. Adore, the firm where Lucy works, is all glossy profiles and empty promises. Its clients treat intimacy like a set of bullet points—standards to be met, boxes to be checked. As noted above, that subplot involving Sophie serves as the film’s rawest thread, and it captures the danger of outsourcing desire to an industry. A lawsuit turns Sophie’s trauma into just another customer service issue. It’s the rare moment where Materialists cuts deep.
The film is also beautiful to look at. Shabier Kirchner, returning as Song’s cinematographer, frames New York not as a postcard but as a battlefield—sharp angles, muted nighttime colors, soft gradings that make the city glow and ache at once. The nighttime sequences, particularly when Lucy and John roam aimlessly, are richer than anything in Past Lives. Daniel Pemberton’s score, too, deserves mention: his gentler themes swell during Lucy and John’s quieter moments, teasing the possibility of something genuine in a world of sheer fakery.
However, despite the evident craftsmanship, I struggled with the film’s message. Song’s gift in Past Lives was her ability to leave things unsaid, to trust in glances and silence. Who can forget Nora holding back tears as Hae Sung walks away, her ache wordless but devastating? In Materialists, everything is spoken out loud. Characters declaim their feelings in prose so pointed it veers into the cringeworthy. Declarations of love and longing don’t land with ache so much as with toe-curling awkwardness. Fans of conventional romance may relish the candor, but for me it felt over-explained, as if Song had lost faith in the audience’s capacity for intuition.
What Happens When the Screenplay Vacillates in Tone
The performances mirror the unevenness. Johnson gives Lucy a steely composure that occasionally cracks into vulnerability; Evans, playing against his usual leading-man sheen, finds humor and humility in John, and it might be one of his loosest, most charming turns. But Pascal is left stranded. Harry should be more than just a device—a man whose wealth, insecurities, and body modifications could have said something fascinating about how far we’ll go to be desirable. Instead, he’s written like a checkbox himself: the obvious “other man” in a triangle where the choice is never in doubt. Calling this underuse “criminal” isn’t overstating it.
Then there’s the ending. Without giving too much away, Song clearly wants to send her characters out with a measure of happiness. Lucy, Sophie, John, even Harry—they all land somewhere soft. It’s a noble impulse, but also one that undercuts the ruthlessness the film spent so much time diagnosing. If love is so wrapped up in money, status, and survival, is it enough to kiss in Central Park and promise to make “bad financial decisions together”? The title is Materialists, after all. To suggest that the characters can so easily shrug off their own values feels like an evasion. At 117 minutes, it plays like a long buildup to an easy exit.
What makes the film fascinating, though, is precisely this tension: its desire to be both cynical and tender, savage and romantic. I agree that in many ways it’s an “anti-capitalist rom-com,” a kind of Jane Austen rewrite for the Uber generation. Others might dismiss it as Nora Ephron or Mike Nichols minus the wit. I fall somewhere in between. There are moments where Song skewers the absurdity of modern dating culture—like a wedding where Lucy convinces a crying bride to go through with it, even though she knows it’s a sham—that feel alive, urgent, and unsparing. But there are also stretches where the film seems unsure, hedging between satire and sincerity, and not fully committing to either.
A Nice Romantic Film that Trades Yearning for Pragmatism
Perhaps the fairest way to see Materialists is as a transitional work. Song isn’t repeating herself, which is admirable; she’s instead simply trying to map the economics of intimacy in a way few filmmakers have dared. But she hasn’t yet figured out how to balance her sharp observations with a narrative that sustains them. I kept wishing for less dialogue, more space. For characters who didn’t just talk about their values but lived them, even messily. For an ending that didn’t tie bows but left scars.
Still, I can’t dismiss it. Too many images stay in my head—the soft glow of a nighttime garden post-wedding, the way Sophie’s voice shakes as she calls Lucy in fear, the nervous smile on John’s face as he offers a makeshift proposal. For all its flaws, Materialists gets at something true: that in a city built on ambition, even love starts to feel like a transaction. And maybe the reason the film frustrates as much as it intrigues is because Song is still figuring out how to film that paradox.
A self-described cinephile who can’t stop talking—and writing—about films. Paul also moonlights as ghostwriter and editor for a few memoirs. He currently resides in the Philippines.
