LSA rating: 3.5/5
Genre: Romantic Comedy-Drama
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Winters
Director: Celine Song
Release date: August 28, 2025
Major spoilers ahead for Materialists. Proceed with caution!
When it was announced that Celine Song was working on her second film, to say I was excited is an understatement. I was seated before I even knew if the film would be released locally. The theatre employees were scared and asking me to leave because “it’s not August yet” but I was simply too seated. Past Lives is a film that resonated so deeply with me, I quickly put Celine Song on my list of female directors that I will watch anything she creates (this list also includes Greta Gerwig and Sofia Coppola). Enter Materialists, with the promise of a ‘modern romcom’, stunningly shot on 35mm film.
In Materialists, we follow Dakota Johnson’s Lucy, a matchmaker who finds herself in a love triangle with her struggling-actor ex-boyfriend John (played by Chris Evans) and the charming millionaire Harry (played by Pedro Pascal). If you’re somewhat familiar with Celine Song’s lore, you’ll notice this pattern of three. In Past Lives, the relationship between Nora and Hae Sung becomes a catalyst for conflict with Nora’s husband. Celine Song’s real-life husband, Justin Kuritzkes, wrote the script for Challengers, which prominently featured a love triangle as its main plot.
You get the picture. After Past Lives, a lot of us weren’t surprised to find out that Celine Song’s next feature would feature a love triangle. What did surprise us was the tone of that first trailer. It looked like a lighthearted romance. The lines were corny, the male leads were yearning, and suddenly everyone began to celebrate the comeback of ‘90s romcoms. The people want You’ve Got Mail or While You Were Sleeping.
Here’s a thought I had just ten minutes into the film: Materialists is not your typical romcom. I’d go so far as to say that it’s not a romcom at all. But it had been marketed as one for months, and I think that has done a major disservice to the film than anything else. Materialists is actually a pretty deep and honest rumination on romance and self-worth. It shows the misery of modern dating and does so with nuance. You’re frustrated about still being single in your 30s, but you refuse to settle for anything less than what you think you ‘deserve’. And then you’re hit with the brutal truth that maybe you’re not the catch you think you are, so why exactly are you setting your standards so high? What makes you deserving of Harry, the six-foot tall private equity financier with drop-dead good looks living in a 12-million-dollar apartment?
When she wrote Materialists, Celine Song drew from her own past as a matchmaker in New York. And what she’d learned was that love is a numbers game. Height, weight, job, net worth, race — these are all taken into account when New Yorkers look for love. “It’s all math,” Lucy says to Harry. Her job is to collect data about her clients and identify potential matches that can check most of their boxes. But as much as we want to be cynical about love and believe it’s nothing more than a business transaction, there will always be an unknowable human element. Love isn’t in the way a person checks our boxes. It’s in the way they can tell that something is wrong just by looking at you because they have already memorised every expression your face makes. It’s in the way they ask you what you’re thinking about because they want to learn how your mind works. It’s in the way you can spend so many years resenting them and still turn to them in your hour of need because they are the only one who understands you. To be loved is to be known.
Is there a point? Yes, but Materialists never quite makes it
I understand what Celine Song is trying to say with Materialists — and I respect her for tackling a topic so ambitiously big — but I felt that it failed to deliver the message in a coherent way. There’s a scene where Lucy’s client Charlotte is about to get married and she goes through a breakdown, and it has nothing to do with anyone but herself. “I am a modern woman, I could have been anything,” Charlotte laments, “but I chose to become a bride. It’s not like I’m getting married because I need to forge a relationship between two kingdoms. It’s not like my family needs a cow. I chose this. I chose to marry a man.”
To me, this scene is the perfect set-up for the rest of the film. It’s a funny line that is also delivered in a refreshingly honest way, and there’s more of that sprinkled throughout Materialists. Here, Charlotte also confesses to Lucy her true reason for marrying her fiancé Peter: he makes her feel valuable. He makes Charlotte’s own sister jealous of their relationship. He is the perfect man, and the fact that he loves Charlotte is enough to forgo any more thoughts of I could have been anything. Not once does Charlotte actually say that she loves Peter though, and Lucy does not ask. It is left unsaid.
Materialists wants to explore the relationship between love and value (both material and sentimental), but it doesn’t really dive much deeper than that. It starts up the conversation, gives us something to chew over a little bit, and quickly moves on. And we see it happen a few more times. We get insight into Lucy and John’s past relationship: he was broke, she didn’t want to be. Lucy’s parents got divorced because of money (material value) and she lets that guide her through her life, but John is someone who prioritises sentimental value. Beyond this, we don’t get any more development — by all accounts they shouldn’t work. The film’s ending doesn’t feel earned because we don’t really get to see them grow as people. They are exactly who they were at the start of the film. So, what makes them ‘perfect’ for each other, besides their similar socioeconomic background? Or the alleged ‘broke boy propaganda’?
With Harry, Lucy’s personality takes a further step back. He’s completely out of her league. He’s a ‘unicorn’. She remarks on this right off the bat, but they end up pursuing a relationship anyway. Halfway through the film she realises they’re not in love with each other and they mutually break up. But the thing is, Materialists doesn’t develop this relationship either. It’s shallow from the start. We don’t get to know them as a couple. Lucy never opens up or talks to Harry about anything real or vice versa. So, what’s the point? The couples were never given equal ground. Of course Lucy would be more drawn to John — after all, he’s known her the longest.
Seriously, where’s the rizz?
I do love a film where essentially nothing happens and relies heavily on the dialogue, but it needs a good cast to elevate it. (Take Before Sunrise for example, or even Past Lives.) When the cast of Materialists was first announced, I was extremely sceptical. I haven’t seen a film in which I felt Dakota Johnson really shone (she was decent in The Peanut Butter Falcon and Am I OK?). She might have been able to pull it off if Materialists were actually the romcom I thought it was going to be. The same goes for Chris Evans; outside of Captain America, I have yet to be blown away by his acting. Even Pedro Pascal is unbelievably uncharismatic in this.
The three leads couldn’t carry the film — and its multiple tonal shifts throughout — as well as I hoped, so the rest of it fell pretty flat for me. I didn’t find Lucy and John’s eventual getting back together convincing because there was no proper build-up. Neither Dakota Johnson nor Chris Evans could do the ‘quiet yearning’ thing very well, so all we’re left with are awkward silences in between stilted conversations. I simply couldn’t buy into their relationship at all (pun intended!).
I wanted to love Materialists much more than I actually did. It wasn’t a bad film, but I felt that it tried to say so many things at once that it ended up saying nothing of importance. I wish Materialists would’ve committed to either being a silly, lighthearted romcom or to diving deeper into something much more complex and cynical about romance. If anything, it did give us a bop of a Japanese Breakfast song!
Materialists premieres on August 28, 2025 at cinemas nationwide.
