Materialists review: Celine Song’s rom-com hits the ground but doesn’t quite land right!

Materialists isn’t like any other romantic comedy you’ve seen before and it falls short of becoming the modern rom-com we so desperately need right now.

Romantic comedies are like life rafts, small, bright spots of hope keeping our hopeless romantic hearts afloat. Watching a good one feels like falling in love all over again, full of giddy belief. Because the best rom-coms don’t just let the guy sweep the girl off her feet, they sweep you off yours too. There’s something cathartic about watching two people beat the odds, navigate the chaos of life, and finally fall into each other’s arms. But the sobering truth hits the moment you step out of the theatre that there’s no Pedro Pascal or Chris Evans waiting for you outside, and you're no Dakota Johnson either. Reality is far less poetic and love these days is stuck in the limbo of situationships, and dating feels like an endless maze of chaos that is vaguely cursed.

That’s why the need for the rom-com life raft feels stronger now than ever. And that’s what excited me about Materialists. Yes, the cast is a dream come true but what truly drew me in was the fact that it was written and directed by Celine Song, a filmmaker who knows how to sit with love, dissect it, and still make it ache in all the right ways. If Past Lives was about love lost, Materialists is about love found or at least what it means to try and find it in our modern world. So, we meet Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a sharp, unsentimental New Yorker and successful matchmaker whose nine marriages speak for her strike rate. She’s practical, stylish, and believes romance is essentially a business deal and isn’t afraid to say it out loud. She’s not one to chase fairytales on the street in dreamy sequences but she is the kind who could fight in a busy street. Enter Harry (Pedro Pascal), a unicorn in human form, a perfect 10 on 10 hedge fund guy with a million dollar apartment and killer 'sweep you off the feet' charm. He desires to settle down with someone smart enough to keep up. And just as Lucy begins navigating this seemingly perfect match for herself, her past reappears in the form of John (Chris Evans), an old flame with whom she shares a messy history.

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At first glance, Materialists looks like a classic love triangle rom-com, one where a stunning looking woman is caught between two wildly handsome, very different men. And as marketed, you'd expect both men vying to win for her heart. But being a Celine Song film, it quickly steers away from that expectation. From the very first frame, it's clear this isn't your run-of-the-mill rom-com. Instead it becomes about choice between a sweeping off your feet love laced with materialism, or a grounded love with financial limitations—hinting at how complicated love has become in our hyper-capitalist times. As desire becomes commodified, falling in love is easy, allowing it to happen is hard. In fact, the film only becomes a comedy when it satirizes the absurd, often brutal expectations we’ve built around modern dating. For instance, each time Lucy's clients keep their lists of demands that includes no blacks, no fatties, no men under 5’11”, only those making 200-300k a year, and absolutely no women in their 30s, it’s funny, yes but painfully real too.

This is where Song’s voice comes through. As she previously proved that she’s less interested in fantasy and more drawn to the unspoken heartbreaks of everyday love, the ones we all recognize but rarely admit. In this film too, love is filtered through calculative judgements or algorithms, reduced to boxes to check, and dressed up in marketable bios. It’s explored as romance in the age of capitalism, where branding yourself is the only strategy left as even plastic surgery of your fault lines is an acceptable statistics of 'you’re only “ugly” if you’re poor'. To the film’s credit, Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography and Daniel Pemberton’s music elevate Song’s shifting tones of the screenplay which moves seamlessly from glossy rom-com to soul-searching romantic drama.

The camera balanced with an atmopsheric score lingers just long enough to make locations or silences speak louder and kisses-hugs feel like long overdue conversations. Its soft gaze is felt when Lucy is with Harry or its raw intensity when she is with John. The cast does wonders with the material as Johnson nails Lucy’s mix of heartbreaking vulnerability and emotionally detached bluntness; Evans brings an earthy sympathetic energy to the poor but heartnumbingly determined John and Pascal, as always, smolders with ease as he highlights Harry’s deep insecurities. They rise upto the challenge, delivering even the most scripted lines with emotional clarity, giving the film an edge where its characters are clear on what they want yet are confused. 

But for all its style and smarts, the film doesn’t quite come together in the way it wants to. It aches to be a profound and emotionally devastating take on modern romance that often depends on financial practicality and when money enters the equation, the foundations of love begin to shake. But it doesn’t fully land. Song’s central idea that love is the unpredictable variable that breaks the math, that triumphs the value of people over money is beautiful, and at times elegantly delivered. But mostly the film is so wrapped in its own materialistic cynicism that often it drowns out its heart. The repetition of math over heart, cost-benefit logic, and emotional confusion is so persistent that the film struggles to convince you whether there’s genuine transformation by the end or if its self-aware characters have simply caved out of fear of loneliness. By the time the film loops back to the caveman metaphor it opens with, bookending the film, the message feels spelled out rather than felt. 

Materialists deliver on its promise of being stylish, star-studded, and emotionally sincere in moments. It attempts to say something real that while we may think we’ve evolved past old ideas of love, we haven’t. Love is still about taking the leap, no matter how messy, irrational, or inconvenient it may be. And that kind of leap doesn’t fit into a careful plan. Unfortunately, the film leaves you with a sense of disappointment, as if you’ve settled for something less than what you truly deserved. It aims to be dreamy, to restore your faith in love even when it's complicated but never quite fully gets there. Or maybe that’s the point because real love is hardly anything resembling in the movies! 

Materialists is now running in theatres near you. 

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