Watching writer-director Celine Song‘s follow-up to her feature debut, indie darling and 2023 Best Picture Oscar nominee Past Lives, all sorts of supposed cinematic influences ran through my mind from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment to James L. Brooks’ Broadcast News to Mike Nichols’ Working Girl and just about anything from Nora Ephron. I left the screening thinking I had just seen the best movie about the search for love in many years.
Call it a romcom, call it a romdram or any shorthand attempt to categorize it, but this is a movie that defies that kind of easy description. But on its surface, Materialist easily recalls so many Hollywood confections where the girl is torn between two guys vying for her eternal love. In this case, though, it is a lot more complicated for Lucy, a character perfectly matched with a never-better Dakota Johnson, who, as a matchmaker in a high-end New York City agency called Adore, has a great track record for hooking up others but not herself. Fast-food TV matchmaking The Bachelor this is not.
Song actually worked as a matchmaker when she was a struggling NY playwright, and clearly that was the inspiration, or kernel of an idea, to follow up such a widely praised feature debut as Past Lives which in its own unique way has its lead female caught up in a different way between two men and two times of life. It too defied easy definition and, coupled with Materialists, confirms Song one of the most exciting new filmmaking voices of her generation.
So Lucy makes about $80,000 a year trying to find perfect matches for high-end clients with a checklist of wants in finding the ideal partner. Vignettes with some of them are hilarious, both for men who want to stop at age 29 as consideration for a match or women with their own quirky needs. In this world, love is a negotiation, and in Lucy’s mind — personally and professionally — money is a big part of the attraction. This goes back to her own experience as we see in a quick flashback to the fifth-anniversary date with her boyfriend John (Chris Evans). Both were struggling actors when they met, John had no money, a beat-up car and lived with two obnoxious roommates. On this anniversary date, we see it all blow up as Lucy finally realizes she is sick of being poor, or at least with John. They break up, time passes, and now at the wedding of one of her successful matches, Lucy is a guest and runs into John working with the catering company. We can still see sparks, but it is clearly over.
At the same nuptials she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), brother of the groom, who looks like he has just come out of Central Casting. He’s a rich, successful commodities broker living in a $12 million penthouse, suave, charming, handsome — you name it. She calls these “perfect” guys unicorns, and does not try to pick him up for herself but instead as a potential date and a surefire winner for any number of her female clients.
It turns out, and yes in classic romcom fashion, Harry has no interest in them, only in Lucy, and this does lead to the matchmaker checking off her own list and doing something rather unprofessional in her profession by caving to Harry’s advances. But will it become true love or just another negotiation, one that Harry is just as comfortable entering into as Lucy thinks she is. Meanwhile John comes in and out of the picture reminding us he is the one who still loves Lucy for who she was, even if she doesn’t quite know now who she is.
Song has cast her three leads to perfection. Johnson nails all the insecurity beneath the surface of this seemingly assured businesswoman, and is superb in what may be her best screen outing yet. Evans, always a better actor than he is given credit for, here doesn’t miss a beat as a guy still struggling as an actor and as a man trying to find his true love, and knowing he probably already did – the one that got away. Pascal, in a role that could have been one dimensional, gives Harry genuine humanity and likeability. This is someone we also can root for, and in a key scene where he reveals his surprising vulnerability (it has to do with a kind of plastic surgery I never knew existed) he is heartbreakingly real.
Among the supporting cast the standout is Zoe Winters, an Adore client who first gets rejected by a match she was willing to settle for, and then in highly dramatic fashion as the victim of sexual assault by another match set up by Lucy who understandably is devastated when she learns of the disastrous date she felt responsible for. This sequence goes into much darker territory than any in the genre usually do, but it also feels right in this day and age to address it. Also fine is Marin Ireland as Lucy’s boss, a woman who has seen it all, and Louise Jacobson who turned from Adore client to bride.
I have to say another main star of this film is New York City itself, seen as the backdrop of so many romantic comedies but here beautifully shot by Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner and dressed by Production Designer Anthony Gasparro as a city where the perfect match is hard to light. A montage sequence featuring the lilting Harry Nilsson song, “I Guess The Lord Must Be In New York City” is a true highlight (trivia fact: Nilsson wrote that song for Midnight Cowboy but it was replaced instead by “Everybody’s Talking (at me)”). Another shout out to Daniel Pemberton’s nicely nuanced music score.
Materialists comes at the right time for a “genre” that studios have forgotten audiences still want, and hopefully will stand out in a summer of tentpoles and action as a nice alternative. Song has made a film that oddly can be admired by romantic purists and cynics, a movie whose end credits take place over the sight of a hugely busy New York Marriage Bureau visually assuring us sometimes people do find that elusive match, or at least hope so.
Producers are Song, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, David Hinojosa.
Title: Materialists
Distributor: A24 films
Release date: June 13, 2025
Director-screenplay: Celine Song
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoe Winters, Marin Ireland, Louise Jacobson
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr, 56 min
