Materialists (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Jalyn Bessonette

Produced by David Hinojosa, Pamela Koffler, Celine Song, and Christine Vachon; written and directed by Celine Song; cinematography by Shabier Kirchner; edited by Keith Fraase; production design by Anthony Gasparro; art direction by Molly Mikula; costume design by Katina Danabassis; starring Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Winters, Marin Ireland, Dasha Nekrasova, and Emmy Wheeler. Color, 116 min. An A24 Films release.

If dating apps were IPOs, Materialists is the prospectus you didn’t know you needed. Celine Song’s follow-up to Past Lives (2023) is not just another Rom-Com—it’s a sultry, precision-engineered satire about what happens when emotional intimacy becomes just another asset class. A love triangle wrapped in tonal cashmere, the film explores how matchmaking, capitalism, and power intersect—and what gets broken when they do.

At first glance, Materialists moves like a romantic thriller: a stylish, self-assured professional matchmaker (Dakota Johnson, in a performance that’s as emotionally taut as it is impeccably dressed) is caught between two men—one rich, one real—in a world where romance is indistinguishable from negotiation. But dig deeper, and it reveals a jagged, provocative critique of late-capitalist dating culture, with all its illusions of control, compatibility, and consent. Song’s screenplay derives from lived experience, since more than a decade ago, while struggling as a playwright, she found a day job at a Manhattan matchmaking service.

Lucy, Johnson’s icy but deeply human protagonist, is the star employee at Adore, an upscale matchmaking service for New York’s elite. Her job isn’t to spark chemistry—it’s to manage risk. Clients are assessed not for their hearts but for their compatibility matrices. Lucy approaches love like an actuary—until the system she built begins to collapse under the weight of human unpredictability.

Enter the triangle: John (Chris Pine), her ex, is a broke but soulful, aspiring actor. Harry (Pedro Pascal), by contrast, is an affable but emotionally opaque Wall Street executive with everything but a soul. Lucy’s relationship with Harry hums with financial ease, penthouse silences, and the emotional sterility of a high-yield savings account. John, on the other hand, represents romantic volatility. Their ideological opposition forms the core of the film’s inquiry: do we choose security, or do we choose feeling?

But Song’s sharpest commentary arrives not through Lucy’s love life—but through her work. The film’s subplot involving Sophie (Zoë Winters), a frustrated repeat client who files a sexual assault claim against one of Lucy’s curated dates, throws a dark, necessary wrench into the sleek machinery. This storyline refuses to let the satire remain abstract. It forces Lucy—and us—to confront the very real dangers lurking beneath the surface of supposedly sophisticated, high-end matchmaking. Emotional labor is no longer just invisible—it’s potentially complicit.

The Sophie plotline devastates Lucy’s sense of control. For a woman whose authority relies on the illusion of romantic precision, Sophie’s trauma becomes a rupture in the algorithm. This subplot elevates Materialists from clever critique to serious reckoning: in a system built to optimize desire, there’s no real protocol for harm. Song’s film arrives at a moment when dating apps function like marketplaces and emotional experiences come with service fees. Materialists doesn’t just acknowledge this—it also implicates all of us in it.

Lucy’s dating life mirrors her work—gifts, brunches, choreographed foreplay. She confesses, “I don’t fall in love. I diversify.” What might be a clever line in another movie becomes here a biting articulation of self-protection—a symptom of life in a culture that treats vulnerability as a liability.

Harry is not just a partner—he’s a hedge. John is not just a past lover—he’s a disruption. Neither is truly real to Lucy until Sophie’s story pierces the professional veil. Only then does Lucy begin to sense the emotional toll of living transactionally. She is not a victim or a heroine—she’s a theory in flux. Cold, calculating, and painfully self-aware, she begins to unravel only when forced to admit that her system has flaws. Johnson plays her like a beautiful algorithm—elegant, but not immune to a crash.

Pascal’s Harry is capitalism incarnate—generous, safe, but unreadable. Pine’s John is the romantic wildcard—messy, idealistic, possibly impractical. But this isn’t a story about choosing a man. It’s about confronting a life structured around emotional efficiency and asking whether intimacy can survive it.

Song doesn’t resolve this tension. She doesn’t let Lucy be a symbol of empowerment, nor of collapse. Instead, she shows her navigating systems of power—gendered, economic, romantic—with clear eyes and scar tissue.

Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography renders Materialists in glass, gold, and muted tension. Interiors gleam like startup demo rooms. Lucy’s office is more showroom than sanctuary. Song’s use of aesthetic perfection—gorgeously curated yet emotionally sterile—underscores the film’s core concern: when every surface is manicured, what’s left of the human beneath?

The film’s rigor is its strength—and its Achilles heel. Some viewers may find the emotional distance alienating. The clinical tone, the muted performances, the glacial pacing—all of it may feel antiseptic. But the film is not cold by accident. It’s cold with purpose. Even the soundtrack—minimal, ambient, and eerily detached—mirrors the inner lives of characters who don’t know how to feel without optimizing first.

But these are not failures. They’re formal strategies in a film about surfaces, systems, and the spaces where love gets lost. In Materialists, Song has created not just a romantic satire, but also a razor-edged inquiry into the way we live now—swiping, scheduling, risk-assessing, always one optimization away from connection. It’s a film that understands that love today is a high-stakes transaction—and that even in elite circles, vulnerability is the final frontier.

But beneath all the polish of the film, something raw pulses through—a woman confronting the limits of control; a business model crumbling under the weight of real emotion; and a system that doesn’t know what to do when harm breaks the terms of service.

Song doesn’t give us easy catharsis—but she gives us clarity. In the end, Lucy doesn’t just choose between two men. She chooses to risk being human.

Jalyn Bessonette is a college student in Texas who is studying marketing.

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Cineaste, Vol. L, No. 4