Review: Materialists

Céline Song’s Materialists wants to be about everything. Love, money, class, authenticity, transactional relationships—the whole modern dating Rolodex. It starts in a promising register: moody, ironic, almost promising a send-up of a culture where personal fulfillment is as algorithmically engineered as a Hinge prompt. But somewhere along the way, it loses its script—and more crucially, its soul—dissolving into a gentrified rom-com that feels like a prestige knockoff of a Hallmark original.

As Lucy, a high-end matchmaker who lives in a sun-drenched Brooklyn apartment that only exists in movies and the Airbnb dreams of mid-tier influencers, Dakota Johnson plays her part with a kind of effortless detachment that toes the line between aloof and vacant. She’s magnetic, but in the same way a mannequin at a department store is—beautiful, abstractly expressive, vaguely European. She’s not playing a person so much as an algorithmic moodboard.

Lucy’s current client roster includes the nouveau-rich and the tech-bro elite, men who approach love like brand curation. Into this world enters Harry (a somewhat dull Pedro Pascal), a billionaire VC whose greatest passion is humble-bragging. Their relationship? Strictly business—until, of course, it’s not. Toss in a throuple subplot with the poor but likeable John (Chris Evans) that could’ve added spice but instead feels like a plotline stolent form a routine rom-com, and you get a film that flirts with being provocative before becoming an all too familiar lesson that money can't buy love.

The central metaphor of dating-as-commerce is well-worn, and Song doesn’t reinvent it so much as dress it up. There’s no shortage of visually slick tableaus—people staring at their reflections, talking over sleek marble countertops, or swiping through potential partners like they’re picking throw pillows. But none of it says anything. For all the things the film started to say about modern dating, it ended up having about as much insight into dating as the 80s film that put Patrick Dempsey on the map, Can’t Buy Me Love, in which a dorky high schooler who mows lawns pays a popular girl to date him and she falls for him, realizing popularity isn’t everything.

Materialists could have interrogated how late capitalism has hollowed out intimacy, how love has become something you purchase in tiers, with “platinum compatibility guarantees.” Instead, it opts for a sleek, irony-poisoned version of the same old fantasy: that even in a world where everything is commodified, true love will prevail. Even as it bills itself as incisive, the film ultimately affirms the same old myth—just with better lighting and indie-rock needle drops.

Where Song’s Past Lives was introspective and spiritually devastating, Materialists is airless and arch. It swaps emotional resonance for aesthetic precision, vulnerability for coolness. That might be part of the point—maybe we’re all just playing roles, performing love for the algorithm, substituting honesty for optimization. But the film never lands its critique. It gestures at depth and then ducks behind a designer handbag.

There’s a smarter, sadder movie somewhere inside Materialists, one that genuinely wrestles with what it means to love and be loved in a world where attention is currency and desire is monetized. But this isn’t that movie. Instead, we get an expensive-looking mood piece that’s too scared to feel uncool by saying anything earnest.

By the time the credits roll, we’re left with beautiful people in beautiful places, circling around an idea of love that feels as remote and curated as their wardrobes. The final takeaway? When it comes to romance and revelations, you might get more mileage out of rewatching Can’t Buy Me Love. At least that film knew it was a fantasy.

2/5