Review: MATERIALISTS (2025)
Talk about a hard sell: a Frankensteinian hybrid of two genres, the classic Hollywood rom-com and the all-out satire, geared at least partly to a love-sceptic generation of people who are having less sex. In Celine Song’s follow-up to her overly-sentimental debut Past Lives (2023), Dakota Johnson plays Lucy, a matchmaker for a dystopian yet tragically plausible New York dating agency called Adore Matchmaking for affluent divorcees who have a shopping list of superficial criteria - whether it’s blue eyes, 6ft, white, rich, early-20s-not-late-20s, good body, fertile, fun - for their potential romantic partners (partner being the operative word, here: Lucy detachedly says things like “dating is a business deal”, and “(s)he checks a lot of our boxes”, when talking about her work). Complicating what sets out to be an already alien atmosphere is a more traditional love triangle between the jaded Lucy, the successful private equity manager Harry (Pedro Pascal), who she meets at the opulent wedding of one of her clients, and the down-on-his-luck struggling actor slash cater-waiter and Lucy’s ex flame John (Chris Evans).
What could have been a clunky meld of two thematic endeavours turns out to be a match-made-in-heaven, and an oppourtunity for Song to cut her teeth on a more layered idea: the world of Materialists is eerie and impersonal, but with a couple of forgiveable exceptions the lethargic, uncanny tone is well-managed - in fact every aspect of Materialists feels gently composed: no performance or line of dialogue oversells it; cinematographer Shabier Kirchner does an impressive Sven Nykvist impression with dense blocking and lamplit compositions; and the cast feels hand-picked; I’m not sure this movie works at all without the alien spaciness of Dakota Johnson. Pascal and Evans, for their part, finish the entangled triumvirate with a mixture of mannered courtliness that masks boyish wounds of their own, completing what I’ll call a comedy-of-scammers (you’ll be surprised how easy it is to believe Captain America is an out-of-work actor and Mr Fantastic is a jaded businessman).
There’s a touch of Whit Stillman and Bret Easton Ellis here and a bit more of Woody Allen there, (just look at that poster), but one of the biggest compliments I can give Materialists is that Song’s voice - impassioned, fatigued, online- has of this sophomore feature become its own. The director still perhaps has a penchant for treacly endings that I’d be curious to see her do away with completely, but for a film about the increasingly transactional world of- not love but dating- Materialiast’s idealistic third act comes as a healthy counterweight to an initially demoralising vision of not just wealthy Manhattan but this century as a whole, ultimately managing to toe the line between moralising sentiment and, as the film puts it, that dimensional state of love that is always, admirably and devotionally, “cautiously optimistic”.
