Materialists

by Chris Stewart 07.2025

Materialists, Celine Song's follow up to her mature Past Lives, is an unusual animal. Operating nominally in the romcom genre, writer-director Song takes us off the beaten path—somewhere pensive and didactic. She has fundamental, cleanly (sometimes too cleanly) phrased ideas. They're sincerely communicated. They're also on the verge of alien, but only insomuch as they reflect how unreasonably we approach modern dating. In internet parlance: it's a film where everybody constantly says the quiet part out loud.

How did we get here? Materialists opens with a man approaching a woman in some unspecified  tribal past. He offers her a floral ring. Cut to present-day New York City, where the same questions of what love is and why we want it are still pressing, and—Song proposes—no less fraught. More than once, the idea that marriage is an economic proposition is spoken, sometimes drolly, sometimes hopefully, and sometimes with pained acknowledgment. 

Lucy (an ideal Dakota Johnson), a high-end matchmaker, made cynical by her endless procession of self-sabotaging clients and their unreasonable expectations, is pursued by the wealthy, soulful Harry (Pedro Pascal, credible as always). At the same time, her ex-boyfriend, John (Chris Evans, who

seemed miscast on my first watch and upon a second viewing, correctly modulating a tricky role) reappears in her life. She's long since made up her mind that she will settle with someone wealthy and stable, period.  And yet Harry, who checks every box, stares into her soul and chooses her, and she pulls back. This is what she wants, but her sense of value, effort, and eventually, romance, risk collapsing when it's suddenly actually offered.

With Harry, there's no catch. Eventual revelations have nothing to do with his decency, but only confirm what she knew: we're all selling a package. With John, the love has always been there, but he's still living paycheck to paycheck, and is a reminder of when they both were would-be actors. She bailed and found stability and financial success. He's still grinding, sharing an apartment, starring in off-off-Broadway plays. If you can't tell, we're squarely more in rom than com territory here, with that somewhat false label denoting only that the mood is light, the script accommodating of funny observations and occasional montage, and the performers approachable figures with conventionally attractive lives. But it's a pained tale, and the aim is to find and present human truth.

In this world, there's always a deal on the table. Even when Lucy softens up, her ambition cracked by empathy, fear, and the consequences of treating people transactionally, there's a meticulousness to the proceedings that sits strangely in the moment. Are we telling or dismantling a love story here? The final passages of the film answer this unambiguously—but do not render the preceding film any less unusual, in its quiet way. I was unsatisfied five ways to Sunday as I first watched Materialists, and by the end immediately arranged to see it again.

Materialists

Run Time: 117 minutes

Director: Celine Song