«Materialists» Review: Romance as a Business Plan

Even more frustratingly than in her debut film Past Lives, Celine Song’s new feature, Materialists, has everything it needs to be a great movie — and still isn’t. It has the theme, the cast, the ideas, the style, the tone, and even the intelligence of a great film, but it ends up being less than the sum of its parts. Like the symbolic checklists that prospective dates must fill out in the matchmaking business run by its protagonist, the film ticks all the right boxes — and yet fails to make you fall in love. There’s a certain magic that can’t be reverse-engineered like a spreadsheet. It’s either there or it’s not. And in this case, it’s there at the beginning, only to fade as the (love) story goes on.

Song’s film tries to function both as a romantic drama (with a more serious tone than typical rom-coms) and as a meta-reflection on the genre itself — and on the institution of marriage in general. From the very first scene — a curious, almost absurd Paleolithic vignette showing a couple whose relationship is clearly tied to the exchange of material goods — the film lays out its thesis: this is not a film about love, but one about what we really mean when we talk about love. It’s a smart and relatively unexplored concept, especially in a genre that rarely examines romance through the lens of economics, pragmatism, or calculation. Song takes on that uncomfortable challenge: questioning (and making us question) what we’re really looking for when we imagine a partner for life.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson, more engaged in her role than usual, even within the emotional coldness of her character) is a woman in her mid-thirties who works as a matchmaker at an upscale dating agency. She finds partners for her clients in a way that’s supposedly more human and personalized than what an app could offer. Her clients, who are generally wealthy, tend to look for people from a similar social background and are often extremely specific in their requirements: a certain height, below a certain body mass, a particular income bracket, within a defined age range, and so on. They don’t want to leave anything to chance. What they’re after is a kind of algorithmic Frankenstein, tailored to fit their tastes, needs, or obsessions.

Lucy excels at the job because she treats it like a business spreadsheet, a game of data-matching. The film proper begins — in a polished, picture-perfect version of New York City straight out of genre tradition — with Lucy orchestrating a successful wedding between two clients. This is the ultimate achievement in her company, and it’s treated like winning a championship. She’s invited to the event and even helps the bride calm her nerves by talking her through the economic and strategic benefits of the union. It’s a business transaction, dressed in white.

At that party, Lucy meets the two men who will shape her future. One is Harry (Pedro Pascal, working nonstop these days), the brother of the groom: suave, charming, and rich — someone Lucy sees as a potential client, although it’s clear he has other intentions. The other is John (Chris Evans), Lucy’s ex, now working as a waiter. He’s the classic «good guy,» nearing 40, still living with roommates, and struggling to make a living as a theater actor. Lucy claims not to care about marriage — she envisions herself always living alone — but the story will soon force her to choose between love and material security.

Song lays out her themes like an open deck of cards. Materialists doesn’t shy away from putting forward a sort of Marxist interpretation of marriage, not as the fruit of that romantic “superstructure” we call love, but as a mechanism for protecting property and maintaining control. Lucy, with her emotionally detached approach, knows how to play that game expertly. But the real conflict begins when she herself becomes part of the system she helps perpetuate — and the numbers on her spreadsheet no longer add up in the real world.

It’s a compelling premise, and early on, Song handles it with precision. The scenes unfold slowly, with long, emotionally charged conversations that aren’t witty or snappy, but more in line with Past Lives: deliberate, melancholic, revealing. The film avoids the usual shot-reverse-shot rhythm of the genre. Instead, it lingers on characters’ faces in silence, embraces a contemplative tone, and offers something rare in romantic storytelling. The cast, of course, is charismatic. And while the overall aesthetic aligns more with glossy Hollywood rom-coms than with arthouse deconstructions, this actually works in the film’s favor, positioning it somewhere in between. In other words, Materialists may be an auteur film, but it sells itself as a slick studio product.

The problem is that once the film presents its thesis, it doesn’t quite know where to go from there. As Lucy begins seeing Harry, wrestles with a work crisis, and circles back toward John, the screenplay (written by Song herself) starts spinning its wheels. Dialogue becomes repetitive, mechanical — full of TEDTalk-like monologues that reiterate the same points. As Lucy sinks deeper into personal crisis but continues to speak in business jargon even about her own life, the film gets stuck in a thematic loop it can’t escape. And that affects everything else. Her relationships with Harry and John lack the emotional credibility the genre depends on. There’s no real chemistry, and the emotional core — the love, the heartbreak — never quite makes it through the screen. The film becomes a cerebral dissertation on love, marriage, and cinema that never fully takes root in its characters.

Materialists is undoubtedly an intelligent film, one that brings to the table questions few filmmakers — Woody Allen among them — have dared to explore within the romantic genre. But where Allen, at his best, blended intellectual depth with lasting emotional resonance (Annie Hall, Manhattan), Song can’t quite cross that bridge. She poses the questions, but doesn’t reach the emotional answers. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the film falls short — there are concrete issues, yes, but there’s also an intangible absence, something that just doesn’t click. In fact, a long final shot over the closing credits ends up being more meaningful, and in its own way more moving, than the actual resolution of the story. And that shot, tellingly, confirms that Song’s ideas are more compelling than her characters.