Materialists: Manhattan Psycho Meet Cute

The way I see it, there are four ways to explain my reaction to Celine Song’s sophomore effort, Materialists (2025):

• It is trying to “do something” and fails miserably.
• It is not trying to “do something” and fails miserably.
• I am a tasteless fraud so singularly out of step with the very concept of art that I should bury myself alive.
• It’s not for me.

3) is out for personal reasons. 4) seems possible, though, if it is “for someone,” I can only pray they rediscover the experience of subjectivity at some point. That leaves us with 1) and 2).

Song stitches the shell together from carapaces  of rom coms past. Her list of influences says as much. Dakota Johnson plays a woman (Lucy) with no personality who works at a high-end matchmaking service in Manhattan. At the wedding of two of her clients, she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal) a charming “10 out of 10” who works in private equity (or was it hedge funds? Is there a difference?). Just as she flatly shares her favorite drink combination with Harry, the waiter plops a beer and a coke down on the table. He is her ex, an immiserated theater actor named John (Chris Evans), who refills water glasses at fancy dinners when he runs out of off-off-Broadway stipend money. The plot, I’d hazard a guess, suggests itself to you from there.

Lucy, who believes in money, power, and (my read here) Satan’s supremacy over all things worldly, brings a Moneyball (2003) edge to the dating game. What she learns, dear reader, is that love is messy and does not necessarily submit itself to quantification. Sometimes, you just need to let your hair down and dance the night away.

Fair enough. That’s a moral I can get behind. What made less sense to me was Song’s way of getting there. Every character in Materialists speaks with no guile. They are somehow both completely emotionally available and stilted. I can only imagine it’s the total victory of CBT in the average Manhattanite’s life.

Witness: when Lucy traces Harry’s leg-lengthening scars in the middle of the night, they immediately progress into an entirely reasonable conversation about the benefits of having your legs broken and extended. Lucy says she doesn’t care. She just doesn’t love him. Oh, the passion. The tension sits thick, like the air humming around in a conference room while executives shake hands over a deal well made.

Everyone talks like this, which makes Lucy’s emotionally fraught reaction to one of her client’s being assaulted all the more shocking. But she seems more shocked than is warranted (how could a cold-blooded woman working in Manhattan not predict that setting up two people of vastly different ages on a blind date could produce something so awful?). I think that’s supposed to be the emotional center of the movie. It’s hard to say. I fell asleep three times.

With that in mind, let’s think about 1). Is all this stone-faced mysticism a criticism of contemporary dating life? A jab at the eponymous materialists? Entirely possible, though the film makes no attempt to get you there. Some human presence, someone looking in from the outside with even an ounce of humanity might have given the viewer some vantage point from which to make sense of this unemotive mess. In any case, I think Song thinks that she’s aiming at 1).

I’ve been mean here; I’m aware. So let me pay a compliment. This film is gorgeous. Shabier Kirchner deserves all the credit in the world for his entrancing shots of the City. The 35mm film looks phenomenal; the images far exceed the writing. That part—the matter that makes film “film”—that was for me.