Materialists Film Review: Celine Song’s Follow-Up Might Just Be Too Polished

Celine Song’s Materialists is a formally striking, carefully constructed examination of intimacy in the age of aspiration — a film that repackages the romantic comedy as moral provocation, but often undercuts its own message with over-polished aesthetics and half-completed ideas.

This is Song’s second feature after Past Lives, a debut that earned widespread acclaim for its emotional subtlety and narrative restraint. Given that precedent, expectations were high for her follow-up — perhaps unfairly so. Where Past Lives was quiet and universal, Materialists is noisy, specific, and deeply embedded in the hyper-stratified world of New York’s elite dating economy. That sharp change in tone is a statement in itself. Whether or not it works is a more complicated question.

The Cast of Materialists

Dakota Johnson stars as Lucy, a former actor turned professional matchmaker at a firm called Adore. In her own life, Lucy refuses to date anyone who isn’t wealthy — a self-imposed restriction that gives her professional success but personal isolation. She’s celibate by choice and disillusioned by design. This setup, on its face, is pure rom-com fodder. But Song quickly subverts the fantasy by layering in harsh truths about financial precarity, aspirational identity, and the transactional nature of modern relationships.

Two men arrive to complicate Lucy’s resolve: John (Chris Evans), her struggling-actor ex, and Harry (Pedro Pascal), a billionaire financier who courts her with expensive dinners and quiet reassurances. The triangle is familiar, but the dynamics are flipped — it’s Lucy who holds the ideological power, even as she finds herself torn between romantic nostalgia and capitalist comfort.

The echoes of Past Lives are obvious. Once again, Song positions a woman at the centre of two paths — love without stability, or stability without love. But unlike the emotionally open-ended conclusion of that first film, Materialists offers a clearer resolution. That clarity, ironically, makes the film feel less rich.

A Romance Engineered for the Algorithm

There’s a persistent friction between intent and execution in Materialists. Song draws heavily on classic rom-com tropes only to sidestep them — or try to. Characters deliver monologues that feel plucked from self-help manifestos, and the script’s clearest thematic beats often arrive pre-underlined. Lucy isn’t just caught between two men; she’s caught between value systems. The film foregrounds a visual binary — light versus dark, white versus black — as a recurring motif, with characters often framed or dressed in contrast to highlight the internal battle Lucy navigates.

Yet for all the visual cleverness, the subversion rarely cuts deep. As a viewer, you’re constantly aware of how constructed everything is. Song’s decision to shoot on 35mm with cinematographer Shabier Kirchner results in stunning compositions, but ones that distance rather than draw in. Every frame is deliberate, often achingly so. Faces are lit with textbook precision. On multiple occasions, Pedro Pascal’s cheek is so perfectly blocked it forms a Rembrandt triangle — a nod to classic portraiture that also feels like a wink at the artificiality of the entire enterprise.

This approach has a logic. After all, Materialists is about the performance of perfection. The dating world Lucy navigates is inherently performative — why shouldn’t the film be, too? But while the craft is undeniable, the emotional impact is inconsistent. You’re more likely to admire the shots than be moved by them.

Themes of Performance, Capital, and Control in Materialists

If Past Lives was about fate, Materialists is about markets. Everyone in this film is selling something — an image, a future, a fantasy of what a relationship could offer. Lucy commodifies connection professionally and, to some extent, personally. Her decision to only date wealthy men is framed not as greed but self-preservation — a defence against the burnout of unpaid emotional labour.

This sets up one of the film’s most interesting, if underdeveloped, ideas: that love, in a world defined by scarcity and inequality, becomes a form of risk assessment. When a match gone wrong leads to a lawsuit, it’s not Lucy’s boss but her client — and former friend — who rightly confronts her for negligence. The fallout underscores the film’s recurring question: who gets to control the terms of a relationship, and at what cost?

Yet for all its flirtation with critique, Materialists often retreats into safety. That same subplot offers a potent opportunity to dissect the moral hazards of romantic commodification — but it’s resolved swiftly and without much emotional fallout. Lucy’s confrontation with Sophie feels too neat. The lawsuit serves as a plot beat more than a meaningful pivot.

This pattern repeats. The story gestures toward complex emotional terrain — love vs. security, guilt vs. autonomy, performance vs. sincerity — but rarely sits with the discomfort. It’s as though the film wants to ask difficult questions, but is wary of making the audience sit with the unease for too long.

Still, there are highlights. Pedro Pascal is magnetic as Harry, his innate charm tempered by moments of genuine emotional transparency. Chris Evans, too, brings warmth and weariness to John, elevating what could have been a stock ex-boyfriend into a flesh-and-blood human. Johnson plays Lucy with a mix of poise and detachment, though she sometimes feels more like an idea than a person — a symptom of the film’s overall calculated tone.

The script maintains a consistent undercurrent of humour, often poking at the absurdities of modern dating culture. That balance of levity and critique is one of the reasons the film remains engaging, even as it occasionally stumbles. There are sly visual jokes, awkward encounters, and tonal pivots that all hint at Song’s desire to walk the line between satire and sincerity.

Is Materialists Worth a Watch?

Materialists is not a failure. It’s a smart, technically accomplished film that makes genuine attempts to question the systems that shape contemporary romance. But it’s also a film that feels hemmed in by its own design — too elegant to feel lived-in, too structured to be truly immersive.

Song and her husband, Justin Kuritzkes, seem fascinated by throuples and the psychology of triangulated love. Kuritzkes wrote Challengers, another recent film that features a woman torn between two men. But where Challengers leans into chaos and mess, Materialists often feels like a lab experiment — pristine, precise, and ultimately a little cold.

To be fair, following up Past Lives was always going to be a tall order. That film felt weightless in its universality. Materialists is weightier, thornier, and more rooted in the anxieties of a specific class of urban strivers. There’s value in that. But the film’s own perfectionism sometimes gets in the way.

For a story about love, Materialists is oddly reluctant to be vulnerable.