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‘Materialists’ Movie Review: Celine Song’s Tender But Cynical Portrait of Love in Late Capitalism
The ‘Past Lives’ director assembles a delectable cast for a modern romance that wants to believe in love, even as it prices it out.
Director: Celine Song
Writer: Celine Song
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal
Language: English
When Materialists opens with a glimpse of prehistoric man and woman — lovers, perhaps—you may wonder if you’ve walked into the wrong movie. The answer is yes and no. The gesture is deliberate, of course: a flash of the primeval before we land in the hypermodern, in a version of New York where dating is not only transactional but itemised, app-ified, and strategised down to the last decimal.
Celine Song’s second feature, after the sublime Past Lives, is more sardonic and spikier, less concerned with yearning across lifetimes than with what it means to choose love now, despite everything. If Past Lives was about the tragedy of love deferred, Materialists is about the absurdity of love negotiated.
Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, a sharply dressed, unsentimental New York matchmaker with nine successful marriages to her name and a worldview best described as algorithmic. She’s someone who glides through gridlock, argues mid-crosswalk, and treats romantic compatibility like a ledger entry. For Lucy, relationships are about assets and liabilities. At one point, she tells a jittery bride (played with frazzled charm by Louisa Jacobson) that marriage has always been a business deal, a negotiation of tangible and intangible worth.
The movie’s title, Materialists, is both a description and a dare: of course it’s about things — homes and hedge funds — but it’s also about how we internalise those things, how we quantify desire. Lucy is torn between two suitors: the broke-but-beautiful John (Chris Evans), a struggling theatre actor moonlighting as a cater waiter, and the hyper-competent, extravagantly rich Harry (Pedro Pascal), who works in private equity and lives in a $12 million townhouse with aggressively minimalist interiors.
That triangle alone could carry a lesser film, but Song is aiming for something trickier. She wants to probe the transactions that are embedded in romance, and the emotions embedded in those transactions. And so she structures Materialists like a test of emotional accounting. At every narrative beat, you’re asked to solve for a missing variable. The sums don’t quite make sense. And that’s the point.
To Song’s credit, she rarely overplays this conceit. In fact, much of Materialists is suffused with a slippery kind of humour. You can sense it most clearly in the absurd montages where clients deliver breathless monologues about the “boxes” their ideal partner must tick, often with misplaced confidence. There’s a passing resemblance to Stephen Sondheim’s Company here, especially in the echoes of Have I Got a Girl for You and Being Alive. But while Sondheim distilled volumes into a single bar or lyric, Song’s script often gets mired in chatter. The ideas are there, but the insight isn’t always.
Still, there’s pleasure to be found in the film’s visual texture. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner captures New York with an eye that is both fluid and contemplative. Composer Daniel Pemberton provides a lush, searching score that lends the story a sense of emotional propulsion, even when the script meanders. Song, for her part, knows how to hold a moment — a handshake, a hug, a kiss — just a beat longer than expected, as if daring the audience to locate something profound in the pause.
She also makes compelling stylistic choices around Lucy’s two love interests, even if they reveal themselves only on a second viewing. Scenes with Harry are composed, smooth, almost too perfect, the camera moving with effortless poise. When John enters the frame, the aesthetic immediately fractures—suddenly, its a little off, the movement is restless. It’s a subtle trick, but it captures something essential: that dating Harry feels easy but exhausting, while falling for John is hard, and strangely liberating.
But none of it quite coheres. For all its polish, Materialists is a film that wants to be more profound than it is, more romantic than it dares to be, and more emotionally devastating than it earns. Song’s thesis is that love is the irrational variable that blows apart the math, and she articulates it with elegance, even charm. But the film can’t shake its own cynicism long enough to make that idea land. Lucy speaks the language of calculation for so long that the movie never convinces us that she’s experienced anything like transcendence.
By the time we return to those cavemen (yes, we do) the metaphor has frayed beyond repair. What should feel like a beautiful bookend instead ends up spelling out the film’s thesis a little too plainly. We’ve evolved, the film seems to say, and yet we haven’t. Love is still a leap. The market may have changed, but the risks are the same.
Materialists may be much of what you came to see: stylish, star-studded, emotionally legible. But like the relationships it portrays, it leaves you wondering if you’ve settled for less than you deserved.