Materialists: Breaking Down the Ending of Dakota Johnson's New Movie

Cosmopolitan

13 hours ago

If you walked into Materialists expecting a glossy, upper-crust rom-com, you probably walked out blinking and confused. Celine Song's Materialists doesn't end with grand gestures or sweeping declarations. The film begins with a question: what if love were just another asset class? It ends with another: what if it isn't? By the time the closing credits roll, our central lover girl has made choices that feel like a settling of accounts.
At first glance, the film looks like it might be a sleek satire—think High Fidelity in The Row. But like Past Lives, Song's breakout debut, Materialists is less interested in plotting a typical romantic arc than in studying the moment someone realizes they're tired of managing their own life like a startup.
The woman at the center of all this calculation is Lucy (a whisper-perfect Dakota Johnson), a professional matchmaker for New York's elite—though 'matchmaker' hardly captures the strategic, Silicon-Valley-meets-Venus nature of her work. Her clients want love, but they want it optimized. So does Lucy. Or so she thinks.
Lucy had a long-term relationship with John (Chris Evans, shaggy and emotionally vulnerable), a sweet but struggling actor. They lived together in a modest apartment but broke up because, as Lucy says, their lack of money was making them miserable. There was real affection between them, but also a gnawing sense that Lucy's ambition was outgrowing the life they'd built.
Enter: Harry (Pedro Pascal), a wealthy tech founder who meets Lucy through her matchmaking work—and promptly falls for her instead. He's charming and stable, a penthouse kind of guy. He represents everything Lucy is supposed to want.
Harry persists. He courts Lucy the way one might court a promising early-stage investment—lavishly, with patience. She caves, cautiously. Their relationship coincides with a professional upswing: Lucy's clients are coupling up, deals are closing, and her crown jewel match—between longtime client Sophie and a charming new prospect named Mark—feels like her magnum opus. But Materialists doesn't believe in upward trajectories.
Sophie reports that Mark assaulted her, Lucy's carefully balanced portfolio of love and commerce collapses. The algorithm broke. And worse, it's personal.
Harry, good on paper and good in practice, becomes collateral damage. Lucy, having sublet her apartment in anticipation of a couple's trip to Iceland, moves in with John. They travel upstate, slip into old rhythms, kiss at a wedding. But the fairytale doesn't click into place. When John asks the inevitable, 'Are we doing this again?' Lucy doesn't have an answer—only a growing awareness that she's still measuring her feelings against a spreadsheet she no longer believes in.
Then comes the film's sharpest pivot: a call from Sophie. Mark is outside her apartment. The police won't help. Lucy and John race over, not as matchmaker and ex, but as people who care. They sit with her. They file the paperwork. It's a turning point—unflashy, deeply felt, and more intimate than any romantic gesture. And it makes the next one—John's proposal during a casual lunch in Central Park—feel earned, not just emotionally, but existentially.
By the end, Lucy is offered a promotion she doesn't quite want, a life she no longer needs. She says maybe. She kisses John. The credits roll over a quiet tableau of marriage licenses being processed at the clerk's office. No sweeping score. No final kiss in the rain. Just a signature, a choice, and a recalibration.
Materialists is not a film about choosing between men. It's a film about choosing between stories. Lucy doesn't reject ambition or romance—she just stops outsourcing her values to either.
'Materialists' is playing in theaters now.
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