Review: Materialists (2025)
Writer-director Celine Song brings another thoughtful, insightful romantic dramedy
“Materialists” doesn’t have a definite article in its title. I misnamed it in a note the other day, and when I walked into the theater and asked for a ticket, the guys behind the counter both referred to it as “The Materialists.”
Certainly, the film’s central hypothesis — which is that even a successful matchmaker must be in want of a husband — does have a strong Gilded Age vibe. But there’s no “The.”
“Materialists,” no the, is about the work and the romantic life of said matchmaker. The setting is New York of today, not 1880. Instead of being an unmarried, middle-aged yenta, or even Cher in “Moonstruck,” she’s Dakota Johnson and her I’m-31-and-still-hot set of bangs strongly suggest her character is named Zoe or Andi. Actually, her name is Lucy, and she is only the most successful of at least a dozen similarly fetching female employees of a high-end matchmaking service for ambitious, high-earning people who need help finding other, even richer, mates.
At first the viewer is given just what they expect. Two of Z̶o̶e̶'̶s̶ Lucy’s clients are approaching project completion — i.e., their wedding. Her co-workers at the match agency squeal in delight as they throw a minor party for Lucy’s… drumroll… ninth wedding in nine years. (This is treated as exceptional performance, and maybe it is? An average of one per year? Okay. Writer-director Celine Song used to be one of these matchmakers, so it must be accurate.)
When she attends the wedding, Lucy saves the day, warming up the bride’s cold feet with a mixture of realism:
BRIDE: What's going on is that I am a modern woman. I could have been anything. Anything. But I chose to become a bride. I chose this. It's not like I'm getting married because I need to forge a relationship between two kingdoms. It's not like my family needs a cow.
LUCY: Do you not want to get married today?
BRIDE: I have to. My parents spent so much money on this wedding — hundreds of thousands of dollars just so that I could feel like a fucking woman.
LUCY: What's the real reason you do want to marry him?
Several lines of back-and-forth in which she makes Lucy promise never to reveal what she’s about to say. Then:
BRIDE: (My fiancé) thinks my sister compromised. She's never said that, but I know it's true. She thinks he's better than her husband. She thinks he's got a better job, that he's better looking. And… that makes me feel like I won.
LUCY: This is about value.
BRIDE (thoughtful): He does make me feel valuable.
LUCY: Charlotte, marriage is a business deal. And it always has been since the very first time two people did it. You can always walk away if the deal isn't good.
This transactional approach works with Charlotte. Problem solved.
After the ceremony, Lucy meets the groom’s brother, Harry (Pedro Pascal), an extremely rich, masculine guy who’s so confident he lets himself be diffident, even vulnerable. He sets out to woo her, and it isn’t hard, because we next meet Lucy’s ex, John (Chris Evans), the epitome of a starving actor. He’s extremely unsuccessful, and they fought all the time; by contrast, all Harry has to do is be a bit charming and show Lucy his penthouse apartment.
You can see where this is going, and the question is, do you want to go along for the ride? The answer is yes, and viewers have just been shown why: At a crucial moment in a scene, the dialogue gets extremely sharp and revealing. We saw this when Lucy saved the wedding in Act I; after that, at every subsequent moment where it counts, the writing sharpens and casts a revealing light on character, motivation, the scene’s conflict — and in a way that feels natural. Here’s Harry admiring Lucy’s technique:
Your sales pitch is perfect, because you make it feel like it's their idea. It's not like you're telling people they need you — nobody wants to hear that. If they need you, well, something is wrong with them. Instead, you're saying “you could do this on your own, but if you're lucky enough to be able to afford me, why not? You're a luxury good, and they really do feel like they need you, just like they need every other luxury in their lives.
Game recognizes game — but it’s more than that. Not only does this speech neatly (and accurately) analyze Lucy’s sales super-power, it echoes the idea Lucy previously expressed: dating is transactional, and each party has to feel like they’re making out great in the exchange.
The whole movie turns on this concept of transactionality in relationships. And the best thing — I’m not really spoiling anything here, because I’m not going to tell you how the characters resolve this conflict between cold transactionalism and true love — is that the story’s resolution isn’t as simple as “true love wins after all.” Instead, the script gives a more illuminating and interesting both-and solution.
It’s more than a nice trick; it’s really good writing, and just what I expected from writer-director Song. Her first feature, “Past Lives” (2023), was marked by the same unexpected realism and clarity. Both movies feature a love triangle which compares and contrasts two men in a woman’s life, but it brings freshness and insight to the emotional possibilities such a story can contain. “Past Lives” got a Best Picture nomination. I think “Materialists” is better.
I want to give a nod to a particular scene. And maybe this really is a spoiler you’ll want to avoid reading. Not because I’m going to give away the movie’s ending — it’s not the ending. But it is a turning point.
You may remember the 1997 film “Gattaca,” in which competition in a society of the future is so intense that people will do anything to measure up to a set of standards — one of which is minimum height. To do this, it’s possible for people in that future era to add several inches to their height by having a surgeon break their legs and insert, say, six inches of steel rod. After several months of healing and rehabilitation, wow, you’re over six feet tall.
In “Gattaca,” this notion seemed like the stuff of science fiction — a dystopian adaptation to the cruelties of a fascist society. In “Materialists,” it’s a reality,1 and it turns out that Harry (and the brother whom we saw married at the beginning of the movie) both did this to themselves — modified their bodies to add inches to their height and, as Harry explains, double their value:
I know it sounds stupid, breaking your legs to get a few extra inches, but we keep saying it's definitely worth it. It changed our lives. Women, completely, of course. Women just approach us and talk to us now, which never happened before. I haven't struck out since. You can also tell the difference at work, and at restaurants, and at airports. You're just worth more.
To drive home the point, Harry goes up to Lucy. He’s four inches taller. Then he slowly bends his knees until his head is at his original height, and she’s looking down at him. He’s two inches shorter than her.
There’s something both ghastly and brave about this. As a viewer, I admired the character’s commitment to being vulnerable about the part of himself he was (or had been) least confident about. And it’s great to see an illustration of the fact that men are also capable of going to extremes to correct something they are insecure about.
But it was impossible for me not to feel that he was revealing too much. There are some things about oneself that should be left in the past because you’re not that person anymore. Revealing them doesn’t say anything about you now; it just goes to show that you were once an asshole, or a weakling. I once told someone with whom I was in an intimate relationship about how, many years before, I had allowed a tow truck driver to bully me into giving him cash. Instead of being sympathetic, my lover was angry. “Why did you tell me that!?” she yelled. In the movie, Lucy says she feels the same way about Harry as she did before this unfortunate moment, but he’s clearly ruined everything. So don’t do that.
But apart from the cringe factor, this scene, again, shows Song’s ability to get to the heart of things. It’s a talent that makes what could have been a by-the-numbers romcom from another filmmaker into an honest work — best of all, one that never condescends to the characters, or to the viewer.
Is this really a thing? I could research it, but I also don’t want to know. My opinion of humans is already low enough.