Materialists (2025)

We are living in a material world, and I am a material girl

Celine Song was presumably given a pretty wide creative runway, plus access to budget and talent, to make her second film following the buzzy Best Picture nominee Past Lives. I quite liked Past Lives, a film that’s perhaps a little over-felt and under-thought, but crackling with early-millennial longing. It’s soaked in nostalgic ache and dislocation that hits especially hard for anyone who came of age in the early social media era when lost connections re-materialized in the digital ether. That Song had demonstrated promise, was handed this much of a blank check, and still ended up with something as undercooked and adrift as Materialists is, frankly, a huge disappointment.

Materialists is not a film absent ideas; and indeed, that’s part of the problem. It so desperately wants to be a satire about the woes of modern dating, a takedown of a new strain of objectification born in the Bumble era, that it feels like it was conceived entirely on that premise rather than as a story. The most obvious narrative inspiration here is James L. Brooks’s Broadcast News, another urbane love triangle parsing different flavors of romantic compatibility. But Broadcast News, one of the towering cinematic dramedies, thrives on sharply etched, vividly lived-in characters. Its three prongs in its love triangle are people you understand just by spending five minutes in their cinematic presence. Materialists’ trio is on the opposite end of the spectrum. I could barely name a single personality trait between them, aside from, perhaps ironically or perhaps intentionally (I genuinely can’t tell), their job titles, their aesthetics, and their tax brackets.

The film follows Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson), a failed stage actress still living in Manhattan who has reinvented herself as a boutique matchmaker for New York’s wealthy singles. She’s jaded about her own prospects, clinging to the mantra that she’ll either die alone or marry rich. Into her orbit come two men, one from her past world and one from her present world: John Finch (Chris Evans), her ex-boyfriend still chasing theater gigs and waiting tables, and Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), a financier with deep pockets and soulful eyes. The film sets up this triangle — idealism versus stability, romance versus security — and observes Lucy navigate the pros and cons of each.

If this sounds more like a premise than a story, you’re not wrong. Materialists spends much of its runtime setting itself up without narrative thrust, introducing its characters and establishing a “status quo” that only barely escalates. Actual incidents are scarce, especially through the first hour. What passes for plot often amounts to Lucy sitting across from one of her suitors while verbalizing the movie’s themes. Now, I’ll happily defend low-plot hangout movies until my dying breath, but that format demands either sparkling character work or an intoxicating vibe. Materialists offers neither.

As someone who started dating his high school sweetheart twenty years ago this September, a full year before my first cell phone even had SMS, I am probably the wrong guy to diagnose the psychology of this film vis-à-vis the modern New York dating scene. But Materialists makes it pretty clear that it’s a realm filled with anxiety. Lucy is an analog matchmaker, but her spreadsheets and instincts are stand-ins for the swipe-right apps: every client distilled into a cluster of metrics and prompts, reduced to “yes” or “no” romantic match based on whether they hit the thresholds of height, salary, age, and placement on the attractiveness matrix.

It’s blindingly obvious from the start that this is dehumanizing and reductive; yet Materialists insists on taking the scenic route to spell that out. We know Lucy is supposed to be a morally compromised figure because she literally announces, “I am a bad person,” with all the gravity of a big reveal. The film treats this like a surprising bit of self-awareness and self-pity, like Lucy is being too hard on herself, which made me question Song’s perspective. Maybe the Manhattan finance-bro dating scene feels like fertile ground for sympathy if you’re close to it. From the outside, though, it looks blatantly toxic from minute one, and Song’s reluctance to say so is off-putting.

The dramatic shape of Materialists is simply broken. Lucy and her would-be partners don’t so much grow or reveal themselves as get gawked at like museum exhibits. The narrative-proper amounts to a handful of conversations between Lucy and each partner about their relative merits and romantic options. Even the comic register never quite lands; Song edges toward irony and acidic bite but rarely crosses into either. A late scene, in which Lucy and John crash a wedding and narrate the couple’s doomed future over the romantic tableau, should be the best in the movie. On paper, it’s a cutting bit of subversion, a lens into just how broken the perpetually lonely hearts have become. In practice, it’s dreary and has no punch, a first draft no one ever sharpened, because it’s just more jaded and low-insight noise.

The cast doesn’t do much to elevate things. I’ve become a defender of Dakota Johnson’s trademark brand of smoldering disaffection, in which her every line suggests she disdains being in her own movie. But here that quality hollows Lucy out entirely. The casting makes sense on paper: Johnson’s detachment could highlight Lucy’s calculating approach to relationships. In practice, whether through poor direction or poor conception of the character by Johnson and Song, it renders her as an alien, inhuman presence. To her credit, Johnson still cuts a striking figure on screen: statuesque and beautiful and confident, every frame a magazine spread. But charisma alone can’t fill in a character who barely exists.

Meanwhile, Chris Evans and Pedro Pascal do what they can with thin sketches of characters. Evans comes out slightly ahead, if only because John at least gets moments of friction with Lucy where he and Johnson display some sparks of chemistry. Pascal, by contrast, is stranded as Harry, a genial cipher whose defining qualities are “wealthy” and “nice.” By design, he’s the blandest of the trio, a luxury accessory rather than a person. Still, he anchors one memorable sequence: a long, unbroken take in which Harry and Lucy discuss their relationship in the language of “value” like they’re negotiating a business deal and estimating exchange rates, each a commodity to be appraised. I’d wager this was the first scene Song wrote, maybe even the seed for the entire project, and in isolation it’s easily the sharpest moment in the movie.

Through it all, the film at least looks nice. Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner shoots New York with glossy precision, alternating between Vogue-spread compositions and romantic exteriors. He and Song apply a consistent formal language, where most of the conversations take place in long takes of slow zoom-outs that mimic the sensation of people-watching, applied even more skillfully than the similar technique in Past Lives. A handful of Materialists’ moments genuinely soar: the dreamy, soft-lit, swooping slow dance between Lucy and John near the climax, for instance, is surely the most romantic scene of 2025. The problem is that these isolated peaks of feeling only underscore the flatness of everything that surrounds it. In Past Lives, Song could coast on a few indelible images and moments because the film’s very project was corralling messy, overpowering feelings. In a more idea-driven film like Materialists, those fleeting highs are just pleasant touches.

One plot thread from the film’s second half has earned significant backlash, in which the film addresses a more serious moment of cruelty and abuse. It takes the film out of detached relationship chatter and into reckoning with more grave matters. But I actually think this dark twist enriches the material: Lucy discovers that her glossy brand of compatibility calculus is part-and-parcel with a broader reduction of humanity. It’s one of the few moments I admired the boldness in Song’s writing; she follows her characters’ worldview to its logical and unsettling end. It doesn’t gracefully integrate into the film’s larger arc, and Song bends the writing backwards to fully absolve and redeem Lucy, but the subplot deepens the otherwise thin critique of a culture that treats romance like a free market transaction. (On the other hand, another much-discussed plot point, a framing story of cavemen supposedly participating in humanity’s first marriage, is so pointless and trivial that it’s only worth mentioning in this parenthetical.)

Small flashes of insight or cinematic beauty can’t save the whole. Materialists is one of the year’s biggest disappointments: a romantic drama that crumbles under stunted writing and hollow characters. Song clearly knows how to stage a moment; a few images and gestures here remind you why Past Lives made her a name to watch. But sophomore slumps don’t come much steeper than this. For all its talk of value and compatibility, the film itself feels like a bad match: a concept rich in the possibility of bleak satire and fiery character portraiture, executed in a style with the emotional resonance of an ad in Vogue magazine.

Is It Good?

Not Very Good (3/8)

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Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.