‘Materialists’ movie review: Celine Song’s rueful audit of modern romance

A dissection of love as commerce in a world drunk on status and security, Celine Song’s follow-up to ‘Past Lives’ has what it takes to Make Rom-Coms Great Again

If 2023’s Past Lives was Korean-American filmmaker Celine Song’s ode to the spectral what-ifs of love, her second film, Materialists, is a sharp-witted lament for what love has become. Don’t let A24’s blingy 2000’s-core marketing fool you. This is not the breezy rom-com you were promised. Song, who seems constitutionally incapable of telling a dishonest story, has made a film that looks like a fairy tale of modern dating in Manhattan, but soon reveals itself as a wickedly incisive autopsy of 21st century romance as we know it.

Set against the backdrop of New York’s upper crust, Materialists follows Lucy (a velvet-voiced Dakota Johnson delivering a calculated, alluring performance), a high-end matchmaker who approaches love the way a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer approaches a hostile takeover. Love, here, is not something one falls into, rather a business deal one closes. Her clients are unicorn-hunters: men and women in search of the impossibly rare partner who ticks every box — height, income, symmetry of features, perhaps even the right shade of mahogany in their flooring.

It is this transactional, materialist ethos of late-stage capitalism that the disillusioned anthropologist in Song attempts to skewer. The film opens with a vignette featuring a prehistoric display of affection between cavepeople exchanging gifts, as if to remind that this strategic, material approach to coupling is as old as humanity. Song’s wry thesis here runs as follows: we may dress it up in custom tailoring and craft cocktails, but the hunt has always been about survival, status, and security.

The modern counterpart to those ancient pairings is Lucy’s Adore office, a deceptively luxe hive of romance capitalism. But the thought behind this chic, girlboss Eden of matchmakers soon looks ready to collapse under its own irony. The young women who work here toast every successful engagement like investment dudebros celebrating a deal. The more you look, the cheaper it all seems.

Into Lucy’s carefully constructed world come two men: John (Chris Evans ditches his superhero cut for something rawer and revealing), the scruffy ex who she’s still not quite over, and Harry (Pedro Pascal, oozing charm with just enough smarm to keep you guessing), a private equity prince who lives in a Tribeca penthouse. The love triangle is more than familiar territory for Song’s fans, but here it’s not so much about choosing between these two men as it is about confronting the void where Lucy’s real desires should be.

Lucy isn’t searching for love. She’s searching for literal terms of endearment. She’s looking for a man who meets the minimum viable requirements for a lifelong contract. Johnson plays her with a savvy detachment that never tips into caricature. She is forever calculating, but never unfeeling. There’s a flicker of recognition and a buried longing that surfaces just often enough to show us that even the most hardened materialist has a soul somewhere under all the lifeless math.

For all his 10/10 polish, Pascal’s Harry reveals himself as just as transactional as Lucy, which perhaps makes them perfect for each other if you believe that love is more of a merger than a miracle. Evans’s John, meanwhile, struggles to keep afloat, and though he still yearns for what he lost, his regret is laced with tenderness.