'Materialists' Review - Celine Song Breaks Our Hearts (Again) With Her Tender Look At Love And Self-Worth

Geek Vibes Nation

3 hours ago

Materialists has a lot of talk about math for a romantic comedy.
For Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a successful New York matchmaker who makes $80,000 a year before taxes and has secured her ninth wedding for a client, it is her primary language. Love is less about candlelit dinners than rows on an Excel spreadsheet. She and her coworkers identify clients by their first name and last initial. She can handily arrange them by the bare necessities: height, weight, build, age, annual income, and apartment size. But she's bilingual, fluent in the language of love that her clients want to hear over their stringent requirements, phrases like 'you will find the love of your life.' And yet, as she dazzles a group of wedding guests (and prospective clients) with claims that there are 'no industry secrets' to finding a love match, you sense that she doesn't fully believe what she's selling to these women. After all, if love can be broken into ones and zeros, why hasn't Sam Altman taken a generative AI crack at it and put Lucy out of business?
Celine Song seeks the answer with her utterly charming and disarmingly astute follow-up to her Oscar-nominated debut film, Past Lives . She starts by presenting Lucy's guiding insight on love. At her client's ninth wedding, an army of bridesmaids ushers her (in formation, a brilliant visual gag) to the bridal suite to give the jittery bride a pep talk. Lucy gently coaxes the hilarious reason the bride wants to marry her husband and packages it up for her in a far more amenable package. 'He makes you feel valued,' she says. It's a stunning, deceptively simple line that speaks to a buried-deep need to be seen for who we are and what we want to be. Lucy's theory is that love and worth are intrinsically linked, which is why people would spend tens of thousands on it. Perhaps romance is something to be automated and anonymized. (L-R) Dakota Johnson
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
Materialists toys plenty with the theory, leaning on the matchmaking profession for its humor instead of the rom-com genre's usual contrivances and conceits. We watch as Lucy has brilliantly absurd intake meetings with clients who have crafted rigid profiles of their perfect partner: from a closeted conservative woman seeking an openly gay conservative woman, to a mid-40s man who defines older women as 28. 'I'm trying to settle!' Sophie (Zoe Winters) exclaims after another failed date. (Sophie's match chastised Lucy for failing to find him a 'high-quality woman.') The matchmakers' language reinforces how this ostensibly human art can be boiled down to cool sciences. 'She's not competitive in the market,' Lucy laments to a coworker about Sophie, exasperatedly laying out her ordinariness. It's funny because you simultaneously believe that Lucy means well and doesn't take Sophie seriously; her world is molded by casual, lukewarm cynicism.
Song tests Lucy's cynicism and her overarching theory with the arrival of two potential suitors at her client's wedding: the groom's brother Harry (Pedro Pascal) and her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans). In Lucy's imagined spreadsheet, the men are polar opposites. Harry is a fabulously wealthy private equity investor with a $12 million penthouse, while John is a cater waiter and struggling actor with two roommates who can barely afford Manhattan parking. Given Lucy's desire for financial stability, the choice seems obvious, but there are complications that have more to do with her than them. She is baffled by Harry's charm offensive, seeing him as a prospective client rather than a lover. After all, as she explains during a consequential date for them, Harry is a 'unicorn,' a mythical match who checks every imaginable box. If he could have any woman he wanted — younger, richer, prettier, ready for kids — why pursue her? (L-R) Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
The core of Lucy's question is Materialists' driving force: the role of self-worth in informing one's romantic possibilities. Song deepens the classic love triangle set-up of head versus heart and passion versus practicalities by grounding it there. Lucy, Harry, and John are all keenly aware of the value they bring to their respective relationships. Lucy sees herself as unremarkable compared to who Harry could theoretically date, while doubting she can support John through his financial troubles. Lucy's doubt of her self-worth further contextualizes her professional reliance on rote practicalities. Harry's breezy but genuine pursuit of Lucy comes from his belief in his 'unicorn' status and that he and Lucy are compatriots in a utilitarian approach to love. Meanwhile, John is on the sidelines, deeply wounded by his inability to give Lucy what Harry can easily offer. These nuances build upon Song's remarkable ability to subvert, but not diminish, the genre's most enduring tropes. 'Snow White' (2025) Review - Where Has The Magic Gone?
Also remarkable and refreshing is the lack of misdirects and mixed signals. Song elevates honest (or honest enough) communication between the trio, manifesting in some of the most mature exchanges in the history of the rom-com genre. At its best, the honesty is blissfully romantic in its own right, thanks to Song's remarkable script and tender lens. Her framing of Lucy and Harry's date before their first time, where Harry tells her she has value, is a fascinating blend of romance and negotiation, with gorgeous low-light and medium shots that position them as Harry sees them: equals. John and Lucy's dance at a barnyard wedding is startlingly intimate, even at a distance, with the camera circling and cutting closer as the gravity of their connection becomes undeniable. (What follows — John's declaration of love — is a genre masterpiece.) There are a few times, primarily in the first act, where the mark is slightly missed, with Song leaving space in scenes that aim to convey chemistry but can read as awkward. (L-R) Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans
Credit: Atsushi Nishijima
That awkwardness is a minor quibble in the face of Materialists ' most staggering hat trick, which shatters its ostensible frivolity with a shocking dose of reality. While it does have fun at its characters' expense — like a brutal cut to Harry offering Lucy a ride home to her riding in John's dingy car — it also treats them as flesh-and-blood people who must reckon with the dangers of dating. Sophie is initially positioned as comic relief, but one particularly upsetting experience is the film's shocking lynchpin, upending Lucy's worldview, career, and relationships with Harry and John. The results can be soul-shattering. Even with that gut punch, Song keeps a staggering command of tone and script, maintaining the graceful romance, blistering honesty, and even levity. She connects that searing narrative beat to the central insight about love and worth, evolving it into a beautifully sophisticated statement about love not defining one's value.
Song pulls similarly sophisticated, nuanced performances from her strong cast. Lucy is an excellent vessel for Dakota Johnson to channel her cool unflappability through, undercutting it with a slight veneer of artifice through her dry delivery. Her best work comes when an external force, specifically John or Sophie, shreds Lucy's disaffection, leaving Johnson to convey the raw insecurity undergirding her cynicism. Pedro Pascal wears Harry's charming elegance very well, practically floating across the screen without slipping into off-putting arrogance. After years of leading action films, Chris Evans's rom-com return yields his best-ever performance and possibly one of the all-time great performances in the genre. As the frustrated, yearning John, he reveals stunning new depths of vulnerability and grace, his eyes and voice expertly balancing palpable ache, teasing cynicism, and heartrending warmth. Zoe Winters, of Succession fame, is a revelation as Sophie, shaping her comedic and dramatic moments into scene-stealing showcases with deeply affecting energy.
ChatGPT hasn't put the matchmaker out of business because, as Materialists shows us, love can't be automated. Love is an achingly human, imperfect art, subject to all the blissful and painful nuances that make it all worth it. Lucy tends to boil love down to snackable lines that win clients over, but the film reveals that the complexities hidden beneath those simplicities are what we're ultimately responding to so strongly. In what seems like a slow death march, aided by algorithms encroaching on everything that makes us, Materialists is a salve that reminds us that we can't be replaced, not our jobs or our capacities to love ourselves and others. It's apropos that Celine Song, who has proven to be an essential voice in romance cinema, is the harbinger of such a vital, life-affirming message.
Materialists will debut exclusively in theaters on June 13, 2025, courtesy of A24.