Materialists

dir: Celine Song

2025

Anyone who saw and liked Past Lives fairly recently wouldn’t be surprised that this flick is a subtle one, seemingly about how great it is to be rich and never worry about whether you’re going to be able to make rent or eat food for the next fortnight, but more about the modern minefield that is dating. Also, anyone that was hoping for something as sublime or exquisite as Past Lives is going to be sorely disappointed.

Materialists is a different film, a different song that plays out in a different register. Being alone, being single makes us anxious. Finding someone to be in a relationship with makes us anxious. Actually being with them and thinking about a future together makes us anxious. Having it all fall apart makes us anxious, because we’re not sure if we can go through all of that again, but we can’t be on our own, because then the world thinks we’re worthless. We are not valued, therefore we don’t value ourselves. We need others to make us feel valuable. Or at least feel slightly less shit about ourselves.

So how do we find someone to be compatible with? I don’t mean a hook-up – I have no personal knowledge of the world of either online dating or online hook-ups: They’re both from way before my time on the dating battlefield / in the dating-mining trenches. But I’ve read enough about them or see enough about them as a phenomena in countless movies and tv shows, and through conversations with friends to have some idea.

Imagine not a dating service, but a matchmaking service, which seeks to pair prospective daters, with people who will be the right ‘fit’ for them. People apparently don’t know where to go, or how to approach people in non-threatening or non-cringe ways, so having someone go through your family history, education and net worth, put your data into a spreadsheet, and then compare it with someone else of the opposite or same identifying gender in order to calculate compatibility, well, that would be a godsend, surely? It would take the guesswork out of it, the messiness, the fear, surely?

Would it fuck… Right from the start this business that Lucy (Dakota Johnson) seems to be brilliant at is a fucking charade. She is a celebrated employee of this company, because of all the setups she engineered, eight have resulted in weddings (we really need to know out of how many setups in order to know whether that’s a lot or a little), yet she hasn’t or can’t use this magical algorithm for her own benefit. She tries her darndest for her clients, but the reality is, this is all bullshit, and even within the framework of what she does (which requires a lot of understanding of basic psychology, which she puts into practice), men are a fucking nightmare. The women she works with might have a long delusional laundry list of things they’d like in a prospective partner, but all the men want is young waifs to fuck, regardless of their own ages.

It’s depressing, it’s demeaning, and it gets worse. Some predators use Lucy’s services, and nothing in her background dossiers or spreadsheets will actually reveal to her who these jerks are until it’s too late.

This is a movie, most likely not a romantic comedy, or a romance at all, that is still, somehow, about love. People desperately fumbling around for an array of dumb societal reasons and expectations, contorting themselves into all sorts of unnatural shapes and positions, and still not finding love.

At the wedding of one of her successful matches made, she meets a man who perfectly ticks every box she could ever have. He’s handsome, he’s tall, he’s charming, he’s rich, and on top of that, he’s obscenely rich. And on top of that, he’s played by Pedro Pascal, the magnificent Chilean actor that almost everyone wants as their daddy or to have sex with, or perhaps most obscenely, both.

Who wouldn’t want to match themselves with Pedro? Everyone would Vote for Pedro, I would say. And yet, at the same wedding she’s attending, she bumps into her ex, some handsome poor jerk called John (Chris Evans, you know, America’s Ass). So, Lucy has had at least one previous successful relationship because she got sick of fighting about money. She’s from a struggling background, her ex still struggles, being a jobbing actor who works in catering to cover his share-house bills despite being in his 30s, that she got sick of as well, hence the hanging out with billionaires with 12 million dollar apartments and $740 shared tasting plates for two.

As she says to someone about the service she works for, once you’ve had a $400 haircut, it’s hard to go back to Super Cuts. Get a taste for luxury, and it’s hard to get by on 2 Minute Noodles and Spam straight out of the can.

These are serious issues. Like, not the dating bullshit, but the money aspect. It’s called Materialists, after all. This film is making serious arguments about dialectical materialism. No, I’m kidding, but it’s at least acknowledging that even more serious than whether one will find their true love, their soulmate, some person they can hang out with, there’s the anxiety most people have about paying rent, paying mortgages, drowning in debt, losing out in the Game of Life, since money and its absence governs everything we do.

Unlike too much evidence to the contrary throughout human history, this film’s bold thesis is that money alone can’t make you love someone, even if they’re great otherwise.

It’s almost like The Beatles don’t exist in this universe, and never wrote Can’t Buy Me Love.

As radical as the money doesn’t equal love thesis is the equal but opposite theorem of lack of money dooming certain relationships as well gets some airplay. Lucy and John couldn’t work at the time because his lack of money triggered her fears about her childhood misery watching her parents fight about money before inevitably divorcing. Reliving the misery of our parents is generally not a path to happiness, but it’s not like we’ve got much of a choice. We’re materialists too, after all.

And yet for all that the film front-loads the idea that as a species, we’re selfish acquisitive dolts who value wealth above the real things that matter, its not so subtle argument from the start is that love doesn’t need wealth or security in order to be felt, and all the multi-carat wedding rings in the world don’t matter as much as a ring made from a daisy, given to you by either a caveman or Captain America, or both.

This film does work for me, let me state that out loud, for possibly many of the reasons why some other reviewers think it doesn’t: It’s about the ‘thing’ that it’s talking about, being love, without actually showing us the thing it’s talking about. Yes, sure, love is that intangible, ethereal, ineffable thing that we hunger for at times and at others angrily push away. But that’s not what we get in the dialogue or the performances. I think that’s one of the reasons why some people who’ve seen this think it’s a flat and unengaging experience.

It would be like watching a film about F1 racing where Brad Pitt and a bunch of other goons sit around talking about how wonderful racing cars at high speeds and not dying is, without actually showing us any of the cars racing around almost crashing into each other at obscenely high speeds. It’s not a deeply felt flick, as in, it may be trying to evoke certain emotions, but it doesn’t pander to elicit them.

There is no string section swelling soundtrack goosing our emotions, there’s no glib one liner like “you make me want to be a better man” or “I never wish to be parted from you from this day on”, or “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her”, there’s just messy but restrained people talking about love and relationships rather than showing us how they experience those things themselves.

Sure, there’s a speech or two here or there, especially at the end, where Lucy needs scant help to allow herself to transcend her anxiety in order to decide whether love or money, or her fears are more important, but even these moments feel practical rather than romantic. The picture the whole movie paints of dating, of seeking to join one’s life with another person, with the possible objective of creating more people, is mostly depressing, deeply depressing, and I’m really not sure that it offers that much hope for the lovelorn. It’s a bleak world where people seem so isolated from each other, but it was enjoyable (at least intellectually) to walk around this stark exhibition and see the naked longing of the characters trapped therein.

I also enjoyed the last scene, which plays out over the credits, presumably at a New York registry office, where I wasn’t sure if the other people (other than the two actors from this flick) there were actors themselves. They, in all their almost infinite variations and permutations, seemed to proclaim the almost universal glory of love in a louder fashion than almost anything else within the movie.

8 times strange play-like films sometimes strangely appeal to me out of 10

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“So, where does that leave us? Here. At someone else's wedding. I can't give you the wedding or the marriage you want. I couldn't even give you the relationship you wanted. It's been years, and I still can't afford to be with you.” - Materialists