Celine Song’s Materialists is a satire trimmed in rose-gold sincerity, a glass of chilled Prosecco served with a wink and a dash of resignation. The film waltzes through the lives of people who treat intimacy as both investment strategy and spiritual wager, managing to feel both featherlight and faintly tragic. Dakota Johnson, exuding a kind of amused detachment, plays Lucy Mason, a failed actress now orchestrating other people’s love stories as a matchmaker for Manhattan’s elite. She’s elegant and wounded, and her every sentence is a self-negotiation.
Pedro Pascal, in an unexpectedly tender turn as the surgically enhanced financier Harry Castillo, infuses his role with quiet longing and deliberate charm. His scenes with Johnson are the film’s soft heartbeats, full of banter, misunderstandings, and the fragile allure of being seen. Harry’s leg-lengthening procedure—handled with absurdist solemnity—could have been played purely for laughs, but Johnstone gently wraps it in the pathos of reinvention. It’s not a punchline; it’s a confession dressed in orthopedic disguise.
Chris Evans, meanwhile, surprises as John Finch, Lucy’s shaggy-haired ex, a caterer moonlighting as an off-Broadway actor who wears his artistic poverty like a badge of bruised honor. He isn’t given the flashiest lines, but his warmth lingers. His chemistry with Johnson simmers not in heat, but in slow-burn regret—a palpable ache that suggests they never honestly stopped orbiting one another, just lost track of the stars.
Song’s direction balances quirk with poise. The film’s tonal palette is dipped in soft creams and metropolitan cool, like a Nora Ephron flick rewired through a cynic’s lens. The satire never quite bites, but it does nibble—especially in the scenes with Marin Ireland as Violet, Lucy’s Botoxed boss at Adore, whose idea of damage control involves lavender oil and nondisclosure agreements. Ireland is gloriously deadpan, and her performance is a masterclass in managerial menace.
There’s a darker thread that threatens to unravel the frothy surface: the subplot involving Sophie (a sharp and vulnerable Zoë Winters) and the abuse she endures at the hands of Mark, a client Lucy matched her with. The moment when Sophie confronts Lucy is the film’s fulcrum. The air is stripped of irony. Johnson’s face, often a mask of ironic confidence, fractures with guilt, and the film pauses—wisely—before returning to its laced-up rhythms.
John Magaro’s offscreen voice, like Mark’s, is appropriately unnerving, a reminder that even romantic industries breed shadows. That Song resolves this thread with a restraining order and reconciliation skirts the edges of oversimplification, but Sophie’s arc retains a satisfying dignity. Her final scene—on a date, smiling without performance—feels like a gentle exhale.
The screenplay is peppered with small, wickedly observant details. A wedding singer crooning an R&B ballad like it’s opera. Harry’s deadpan admission about his surgery’s financing. A passive-aggressive brunch that turns into a quasi-intervention. And in one glorious moment, Lucy confesses that she doesn’t believe in soulmates—just “compatible delusions with good credit.”
If not wholly earned, the romantic resolution feels at least poetically inevitable. That John proposes not with grandeur but over takeout in the park feels correct. Their kiss isn’t about rekindled passion; it’s about acceptance—the kind that arrives at 2 a.m. when the glitter has worn off and all left is the echo of laughter and someone to split the bill with.
Materialists may not upend the romantic comedy genre, but it refreshes it with odd grace and innovative design. It’s winking without mockery, sweet without sentimentality, and anchored by three actors who know that love, like capital, is often more convincing when it’s quietly desperate.
Grade: B+
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