A romantic comedy often opens with a scene where the protagonist demonstrates that she's not like other girls. In Legally Blonde, that's Reese Witherspoon slipping her freshly painted toenails into wedge heels with a heart on them, before she heads out to the date that will ruin all her plans. In Pride & Prejudice (2005), that's Keira Knightley reading while she walks outside, and returning home to her chaotic family. In Materialists—the new Celine Song movie released over the weekend—Dakota Johnson applies lip gloss in a mirror and runs out onto the New York City streets, her high ponytail swinging. She passes a tall man, stops him, and offers him her card. She's a matchmaker named Lucy, and he's tall and rich and would be great for her clients.
But that's not the first scene in Materialists. The movie opens with a vast red-rocked canyon filling the screen. It is beautiful and immense. Then we watch a long-haired prehistoric man chop a bushel of daisies, put it into a backpack, and carry it to a cave where a woman waits for him. They do not speak. The man then twists the stem of one of the daisies into a ring and slips it onto the cave woman's left ring finger. Get it? It's not a diamond. It's just a flower. That's love, baby.
Only once we have been hit over the head with this common framing of romantic storytelling—to be a materialist is to be at odds with being in love—can the movie actually begin and get to work hitting us over the head with that same message in increasingly distressing ways.
Because of how our society has been structured for centuries, it is financially and culturally beneficial to be married. This is a fact that Materialists is singularly focused on, but that obsession unfortunately does not lead anywhere new. Instead of swerving toward ideas about, I don't know, polyamory or family abolition, the movie sticks with the common heterosexual marriage plot. It's one of history's most common fictional forms, so that might be fine if the movie were good. In theory, the basics are all there. The first act, in particular, really worked for me. Lucy is alone. She's a mid-30s failed-actress-turned-matchmaker, so all she does is think about love, and she's poor ($80,000 before taxes, she says). She is vapid, the movie tells us 30-ish times, because she wants to be rich.
Lucy works in a soulless loft for her company called Adore, where she is celebrated at the beginning of the movie for managing to set up her ninth marriage. Then she attends the wedding, where she sells a bunch of women on the matchmaking service by telling them they are looking for a "graveyard buddy," then takes all of their business cards. The dialogue here is brisk and smart. It sets Lucy up as a cynical and efficient broker of love. A gaggle of bridesmaids rush in. The bride needs her! Lucy is swept along through a bunch of opulent hallways to find the bride in a pile on the bed. She comforts her by forcing her to be "brutally honest" about why she wants to marry the groom. The bride, with mascara all over her face, says it's because he makes her sister jealous. "So he makes you feel valued," Lucy says, and the wedding goes on. This is all funny! Dakota Johnson's physical humor is perfect, and Song seems to know how to actually give her deadpan jokes that work for the audience.
This wedding is also important because it debuts two potential boyfriends. On one side we have Harry (Pedro Pascal), who is a tall, rich, well-educated, private equity man. On the other side is John (Chris Evans), who is an actor and cater-waiter who also happens to be Lucy's ex-boyfriend. I do want to note that I had to look up both of these characters' names, because they had so few traits and mostly functioned as flat archetypes. Their main attributes are Rich and Poor, and this is so explicit that it's hard to believe at any point that Lucy actually wants to be with either of them.
The rich-poor divide seems to be the only thing that matters to the movie. While dancing with Lucy in that wedding scene, Harry asks her what she wants in a partner. She tells him that she wants him to either be rich, or unbelievably rich. In a flashback, we get to see why Lucy ever broke up with John in the first place: He was too cheap to pay for parking in Manhattan on their anniversary, so she burst from the car, screaming at him that she couldn't be with him because she didn't want to be poor.
Here, the movie comes very close to doing something interesting, but it's too heavy-handed to pull it off. Nothing is left unspoken, and nothing unfolds with any subtlety. The dialogue is written as everything seems to be these days: as if Song expects that you will be looking at your phone while while you watch. Young Lucy breaking up with Young John because him being broke makes her hate him tells us something interesting about her character, but Song isn't confident enough to let the audience come to that conclusion on its own. Instead, Lucy has to literally stand in the middle of the street and say to John, "I hate you because you're broke." Just about every conversation unfolds like this, with one character precisely explaining their internal motivations to another.
The idea that you could be truly in love with someone, but not the version of the life you could have with them, feels true and interesting and classic. In her list of films that inspired Materialists, Song includes many adaptations of classic marriage-plot novels. Age of Innocence, Pride & Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Howard's End all make the list. These stories benefit from existing in a world where women have no choice but to get married, making the struggle between marrying for love or marrying for money feel vital and existential. Here in 2025, the stakes of Materialists are just ... whether or not Lucy gets married. She'll still have her nice job and her too-nice clothes and her far-too-nice apartment either way. Yet instead of working around this dramatic conundrum with any kind of novelty, the movie just keeps insisting that all of this really is a matter of life or death.
This insistence keeps the characters trapped inside the movie's unsophisticated framing, and the longer they stay there the more alien they become. It's eventually revealed that Harry had leg-lengthening surgery, and after discovering this, Lucy breaks up with him. Lucy can't stop talking about how much "value" people do or do not have in "the marketplace" of dating. John keeps flying into a rage over how crowded and shitty his apartment is, and he hasn't yet figured out that it's a stupid idea to have a car in New York City. These characters would all be more at home on an incel forum than the beautiful restaurants Song puts them in.
Then there's the sexual assault B-plot. One of Lucy's clients is sexually assaulted on a date that she set up, and she feels (understandably) terrible about this. At this point, her boss gives her four weeks off from her job to "avoid burnout," and she spends part of that time off stalking the woman who has been assaulted so that she can try to apologize to her. The only reason this happens, from a dramatic standpoint, is so that Lucy can come to the realization that maybe there's more to life than marrying rich.
The more time you spend with these characters, the more uncanny their world becomes. Having a character articulate a series of surface-level flaws is not the same thing as giving them a revelation. But the movie is also afraid to make anyone too much of a bad person. Are we meant to be implicated by this reality that Song creates, where nobody has any meaningful relationships and nobody can stop talking about every impulsive, selfish desire they have? To do that, I would need to have friends who were not only mean and selfish, but also were able to articulate their mean and selfish desires perfectly all the time. This is not the kind of friend anyone has.
Lucy ultimately chooses John. The movie ends with him picking up chicken over rice from a halal cart, walking past a museum with banners for a prehistoric man exhibition, and meeting Lucy for lunch in Central Park. While she's on the phone with her boss—she's just been offered the top job at the matchmaking agency and needs to think about whether or not to take it—John presents her with the same little daisy ring from the prehistoric scene at the beginning, asking her if she'd like to "make a terrible financial decision." Love wins, I suppose, but only on Materialist's blinkered terms.
