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“Money makes love go down easy,” murmurs a character in Celine Song’s Materialists — a line so stark in its honesty, it slices through the dreamy daze of most romantic comedies. But this film is no ordinary rom-com. Or at least, it tries not to be. Here, love isn’t the only thing on the table — money is too, and height, and good lighting, and a property in Manhattan that costs $15 million. Song’s latest outing attempts to puncture the fantasy balloon of romance with the clinical precision of a matchmaker’s checklist. But does she follow through?
If Song’s breakout debut Past Lives was a melancholic meditation on the paths not taken, then Materialists is an autopsy of the paths too often chosen. The film follows Lucy, played by the striking Dakota Johnson, a high-end matchmaker in New York who has made a career out of knowing what people want or what they’ve been conditioned to want. Tall? Check. Rich? Check. White teeth and a trust fund? Check and check.
Lucy is sleek, poised, and utterly self-aware. She struts through the streets of Manhattan in her ponytail and Prada, a woman who’s turned matchmaking into a performance art. She knows how the game is played because she wasn’t always in the game. Raised poor, Lucy now monetizes the very class and beauty politics she once felt excluded from. And she’s honest about it. Refreshingly so. She confesses, with admirable candor, her desire to be with someone “mind numbingly, achingly rich.” She’s not pretending she doesn’t care. She just wishes she didn’t care.
Enter Harry played by Pedro Pascal in full unicorn form. Wealthy, well-dressed, emotionally available, and, importantly, over six feet tall. He’s the kind of man who makes romantic compromise irrelevant because he checks every superficial box. It’s no surprise that Lucy ends up in his bed, his penthouse, and soon enough, his life. What’s notable is that the film doesn’t shame her for it. Song, who once worked as a matchmaker herself, knows that money is not a dirty word. It is, in fact, the subtext of nearly every romantic decision we make. Materialists just dares to say it out loud.
But standing in the shadows of Lucy’s glossy new life is John her ex-boyfriend, played by a disheveled Chris Evans. He’s a struggling actor, still sharing an apartment with three other roommates in his late 30s, working catering gigs, and lamenting $20 parking fees. Once, he was her great love. Now, he’s a cautionary tale. And in a world where you swipe right based on vibes and income brackets, you don’t really blame Lucy for walking away.
There are glimmers of brilliance in Song’s writing quiet jabs at the commodification of love, the algorithmic culture of dating apps, the shrinking pool of viable partners as women hit their late 20s, and the racial, class, and physical biases that undergird modern matchmaking. In one haunting line, Lucy jokes that we’re all just searching for “nursing home partners and grave buddies.” The desire to not die alone has never felt more transactional.
But the film, despite its sharp insights, falters in fully unpacking its own critique. A disturbing episode involving a client being assaulted on a date arranged by Lucy is brushed aside far too quickly. And as the narrative arcs toward its inevitable ending where beautiful people find beautiful resolution , Song seems to lose her nerve. The sharp, unsparing realism that animates the film’s first half is replaced by something far softer, more conventional. Lucy starts to “hate herself” for her choices, repeats that line a few too many times, and begins to doubt the very professional wisdom that made her so compelling in the first place.
Perhaps that’s the point: that even women like Lucy, brilliant, calculating, unashamed are not allowed to want what they want without remorse. That even in films trying to subvert the genre, we must be reminded that love should be pure, not purchased. But one wonders: what if Lucy didn’t hate herself? What if she simply chose comfort, security, and six feet of emotional maturity and we applauded her for it?
Materialists is not a perfect film. But it is a provocative one. In laying bare the modern rituals of romance, the Excel sheets of compatibility, the curated charm, the sobering economic math of desire it forces us to reckon with what we’re really looking for when we look for love. It might not always be a soulmate.