Materialists

Materialists, Celine Song's second feature film, does not begin with a chance encounter in Manhattan, but with two cavemen exchanging flowers and tools. This prologue, deeper than it appears, is a clever narrative device that establishes that, since its origins, love has always been linked to material exchange. This gesture, both tender and transactional, becomes the thesis of a film that deliberately presents itself as a romantic comedy. But Materialists is not a romantic comedy, at least not in the sweet, escapist sense we are used to. Rather, it is a melancholic and incisive autopsy of modern love shaped by capitalism, power, and performance. Despite its glossy veneer and red-carpet pedigree, Celine Song delivers a cold and invigorating reality: a study of emotional investment in a world obsessed with market value. At the center is Lucy, played by Dakota Johnson, a matchmaker at a Manhattan boutique agency called Adore, the kind of business that thrives on selling fantasies to the elite under the guise of algorithmic logic.

Lucy isn't just a cog in the romance industrial complex: she is, as the film reminds us repeatedly, its star, with nine successful marriages under her belt. Celine Song, who herself worked as a matchmaker, clearly draws on her real-life experience, and her observations have the bite of someone who has spent too much time around rich men demanding docile blondes in their twenties with a BMI under 20. Through a series of consultations that resemble auditions for late capitalism, Song constructs a scathing anthropology of dating in the Instagram era, where love is a currency, size is a social status, and being 39 makes you an antique relic in the game of seduction. Lucy navigates all this with an aplomb gained from experience, dispensing motivational speeches to her clients while discreetly admitting to her colleagues that marriage is just a business transaction, and always has been.

When Lucy meets Harry, played by Pedro Pascal, at one of her clients' weddings—a lavish ceremony that would make Nancy Meyers blush—she doesn't see him as a potential partner, but as a unicorn client. He's tall, rich, handsome, and, miraculously, single. But Harry, with a disarming sincerity that catches even Lucy off guard, turns the tables by asking her out. What follows is a series of lavish dates—candlelit dinners, designer flower deliveries, waking up in silk sheets—that act as visual aphrodisiacs. But instead of getting carried away, Lucy remains analytical, her eyes fixed not on Harry but on his $12 million penthouse in Tribeca. “I don't know if I like you, or if I like the places you take me,” she confesses. And we believe her. This isn't a coy line from an eccentric romantic comedy heroine, but the confession of a woman who has learned to prioritize security over feelings, who broke up with a man not out of malice, but because she couldn't stand the instability he represented anymore.

Enter Chris Evans as John, Lucy's ex-boyfriend, now a waiter at a catering company, still clinging to his dreams of an acting career. Their awkward and intimate reunion is the emotional centerpiece of the film. John isn't just a romantic ghost from Lucy's past; he is the road she didn't take, the unpaid parking ticket from a previous life she thought she had left behind. The flashback to their argument on their fifth anniversary, staged in a cramped Volvo in the middle of the street, is brutal in its banality: a couple at the mercy of their bank accounts, too exhausted by reality to indulge in idealism. Yet despite all the pain and failure, when John places a Coke and a beer in front of Lucy without her having to ask, it carries the weight of a grand romantic gesture. It's the kind of moment Celine Song excels at: intimate, fleeting, but loaded with history.

What makes Materialists fascinating is its refusal to demonize any of the vertices of its triangle. Pedro Pascal plays Harry with a humility that downplays his wealth, a man trying to be more than just a walking stock portfolio. There's something tragic about his charm, as if he too is trying to escape the role society has assigned him. Chris Evans, meanwhile, delivers what may well be the performance of his career. His third-act monologue, delivered in a quiet field outside a wedding, is raw, direct, and devastating: a meditation on love, failure, and the impossibility of a clear conclusion. The speech echoes James Gandolfini's immortal line in The Mexican: “When two people who love each other, who really love each other, say it's over?” Chris Evans delivers it with poignant precision, and Celine Song lets it breathe, uncut and unadorned, as if trusting her audience to grasp its full weight without easy sentimentality.

But while the performances are excellent, Materialists is far from perfect. The third act introduces a subplot involving Sophie, a vulnerable client played with striking emotional candor by Zoë Winters, who becomes the victim of sexual assault during a date arranged by Lucy. The incident is horrific and should be deeply upsetting, but its primary function—to catalyze Lucy's awakening—feels exploitative. Sophie's trauma becomes a narrative device rather than a story in its own right, a structural flaw that tarnishes what was otherwise a largely flawless character study. It's not that Celine Song lacks the empathy to explore such a subject, but rather that she doesn't give it enough time and space to fully unfold.

There is also a curious sterility to the film's universe. Lucy, despite her intelligence and reserved charm, seems to exist in a vacuum. She has no friends, no hobbies, no inner life beyond the narrative demands of the plot. This is undoubtedly a deliberate choice, intended to reflect how modern romantic relationships can drain a person of their substance, but it risks making her more of a symbol than a fully-fledged character. Yet Dakota Johnson, in her most disciplined and enigmatic performance to date, imbues Lucy with a magnetic opacity. Her impassive acting, often misinterpreted as a lack of emotion, becomes armor here, a protective shell for a woman too intelligent to believe in love, but too lonely not to desire it.

Materialists is less a romance than a treatise. It critiques the commodification of relationships not only through incisive dialogue, but also with visual humor: the dried daisies on Lucy's dressing table echo the flowers exchanged by the cavemen in the opening scene, silently reminding us how little things have changed. And yet, despite all her cynicism, Celine Song doesn't give up hope. Her final gesture, ambiguous, deserved, and deeply human, suggests that love, though never simple, may still be worth pursuing. Not as a product or a prize, but as a shared illusion we choose to believe in, together. Materialists is not about Lucy's choice. It's about the courage to want something that doesn't make sense on paper. And in a world that has turned romantic encounters into data, that may be the most radical choice of all.

Materialists
Written and directed by Celine Song
Produced by David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Celine Song
Starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal
Cinematography: Shabier Kirchner
Edited by Keith Fraase
Music by Daniel Pemberton
Production companies: 2AM, Killer Films
Distributed by A24 (United States), Sony Pictures Releasing France (France)
Release date: June 13, 2025 (United States), July 2, 2025 (France)
Running time: 117 minutes

Seen on July 4, 2025 at Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 16, seat A18

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