Materialists
For her second feature, writer-director Celine Song explores the minefield of dating in a touching, provocative romance about human connection.
Fifty shades of friendship: Chris Evans and Dakota Johnson.
Image courtesy of Sony Pictures.
In our materialistic age many of us are looking for an unquantifiable partner who meets unrealistic expectations. But nobody can fulfil that illusory ideal, not even Pedro Pascal…
Lucy Mason will be the first person to tell you that she’s materialistic, as well as being cold and judgemental. “I’m awful,” she concludes. But Lucy Mason is good at her job. A gentile Dolly Levi, she’s a Manhattan matchmaker who has been responsible for nine marriages and pulls in $80k a year. She has a razor-sharp instinct for knowing what sells in a relationship, because she knows how packaging works in the dating game. If nothing else, Materialists is a terrifying look at the way people commodify their prospective partners, by skin colour, by weight, by height, by looks, by income bracket and, yes, by hairline.
Celine Song’s first feature, the exquisite Past Lives, was a partly autobiographical three-hander in which a New York woman finds herself emotionally pivoted between a man from her past and the new man in her life. In Materialists, partly inspired by Song’s work as a dating consultant, Dakota Johnson plays a woman who is emotionally in the same boat. Against the odds, being a modestly budgeted arthouse drama with subtitles, Past Lives found an international audience and went on to be nominated for an Oscar for best picture and for Song’s screenplay, winning a fistful of accolades along the way.
Materialists is a much bigger deal in that it has a much wider release, three A-list stars and a mainstream sheen, albeit without losing the writer-director’s integrity. While fitting within the parameters of the genre of the romantic drama – we know exactly where the plot is going – it does so with enormous flair, heart and intelligence. Dialogue this good is a rare treat at the multiplex, and it is delivered with soul-stirring sincerity by the film’s three leads. Chris Evans has never been this affecting, as John, a floppy-haired, struggling actor who has nothing that Lucy wants but who is someone she can still talk to. The new man in her life is Harry Castillo (Pedro Pascal), known in the business as ‘a unicorn’, a fantasy figure who ticks every box in the algorithm, a charming, considerate, good-looking, rich, thoughtful, politically enlightened and educated figure at about six feet (apparently, for a man, height is preternaturally important in the world of Tinder and Bumble).
Beyond the appeal of its stinging truths, Materialists is a beautifully constructed thing. Be it the production design, the clothes, the street ambience or the choice of songs, the film is a package to die for. When John gives Lucy a lift back to her apartment, the faint grumble of his car engine speaks volumes about the state of his finances. As Lucy makes a phone call framed by Harry’s bookshelf, her backdrop is a testament to the latter’s taste and education. And, not unimportantly, Celine Song allows us to hear what her protagonists are saying, as if enunciation was a new but essential technology. After all, here are words and sentences not to be missed.
Any fears one might have had that Celine Song would trip up on her own critical success on the way to the multiplex – as was the case with the directors of the award-laden The Lives of Others and Nomadland – are unfounded. Her second film is a grown-up, elegiac, beautifully acted, thought-provoking and moving treatise on the human condition in the 21st century. Both cynical and achingly romantic, it is a comic drama that pricks the human conscience.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Dakota, Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pacal, Zoë Winters, Marin Ireland, Louisa Jacobson, Dasha Nekrasova, Eddie Cahill, Sawyer Spielberg, Halley Feiffer, Baby Rose, and the voice of John Magaro.
Dir Celine Song, Pro David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler and Celine Song, Screenplay Celine Song, Ph Shabier Kirchner, Pro Des Anthony Gasparro, Ed Keith Fraase, Music Daniel Pemberton, Costumes Katina Danabassis.
2AM/Killer Films-Sony Pictures.
116 mins. USA. 2025. US Rel: 22 July 2025. UK Rel: 15 August 2025. Cert. 15.
