Writer / director Celine Song’s second feature, “Materialists,” is a razor-sharp, emotionally intelligent modern relationship drama that both skewers and sympathizes with the transactional world of contemporary dating. Set against the sleek and often isolating backdrop of New York City, the film centers on Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a brutally honest and deeply conflicted matchmaker who finds herself navigating a love triangle between her imperfect-but-familiar former lover John (Chris Evans) and a seemingly flawless billionaire client, Harry (Pedro Pascal), the kind of man referred to in her business as a “unicorn.”
While this sounds like it could be the plot to a romantic comedy, the film is anything but. Song’s script is biting, melancholy, and unflinchingly perceptive, and she’s made a natural companion piece to her fantastic 2023 debut film, “Past Lives.” Here, she expands on similar themes of identity, longing, and emotional truth, but reframes them in a cynical, consumerist world where love is filtered, packaged, and sold, and one where marriage is viewed as a business transaction so a person doesn’t have to die alone. This isn’t a film that idealizes romance, but one that dissects it in the most brutally honest way. Lucy’s own philosophy of “love is easy, dating is hard” may as well serve as the film’s unofficial thesis.
What’s remarkable is the way Song allows her script to be simultaneously romantic and savagely scathing. The film doesn’t just comment on how people tend to commodify partners with talk of income brackets, appearance stats, and social media presence, but it immerses us in a world where that language is the norm. Her characters don’t sound artificial; they sound real. Lucy and her clients talk like people who have already internalized dating as a numbers game and a capitalist exchange, and the film offers no easy judgments about that.
Johnson is well cast as Lucy, who quickly becomes a standout character. Cold, sharp, and often unlikable (but also refreshingly self-aware and honest), Lucy is not selling love — she’s brokering deals. But through her emotionally layered interactions with the fantasy man she insists she’s not good enough for and touching scenes with her unsuccessful and struggling actor ex-boyfriend, Song digs up the truth beneath her character’s polished surface: that connection, history, and vulnerability still matter more than any spreadsheet of ideal traits.
Song’s writing is near-perfect. Her dialogue is precise, funny, and devastating, often hitting on all three within the same scene. She writes men and women with equal depth and clarity, never leaning on clichés or stereotypes. Even the supporting characters feel fully realized, each embodying a different facet of the film’s themes.
The film asks hard questions, too. How do we assign value to people? What does it mean to be out of someone’s league? Can love really survive when every aspect of our selves is reduced to metrics and marketability? Song doesn’t always offer comforting answers, and that’s a big part of what makes the film so honest (and so great).
“Materialists” is a film about the cost of reducing love to a checklist and the messy, beautiful imperfection that comes with choosing emotional truth over social capital. It’s a little cynical, a little hopeful, and wholly reflective of the way we live and love in today’s world.
