In Celine Song’s 2023 directorial debut, Past Lives, she created a quietly profound meditation on yearning and the different kinds of love that appear and disappear in the disparate chapters of a life. She returns to the eternal topic of love in her follow-up, Materialists, with a pronounced grit and determination to make the much maligned “rom com” genre palatable to even its most dismissive critics. And she does it while dissecting all that’s wrong about how modern humans engage in the pursuit of love.
Song uses the excessively gorgeous clay of Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans to play out her theories about the awkward pretzels we humans will twist ourselves into while dating to avoid our messy truths of self-assessment, vulnerability and honesty. Using Johnson’s matchmaker Lucy as our guide to navigating the perils of digital-age dating, Song ends up with an intensely romantic film that quells its initial cynicism to earn the magic that comes with the uncontrollable act of falling in love.
Where Past Lives was gauzy and gentle, Materialists is downright pragmatic in its anthropological approach at portraying how humanity has evolved (and in some cases, retained) its reasons for marriage to exist. Going back to the time of cave dwellings, she plays out the ancient union of a male and female entirely contingent on how well a hunter could gather for his woman. Survival, tools and a hardy constitution trumped lust or romance.
Fast-forward to New York City in 2025 and Song paints society as certainly more fickle but not that divorced from those binary requirements. They’re just sought after through dating apps, or the efforts of a paid matchmaker like Lucy. Several years into a successful career uniting couples in matrimony (nine and counting), Lucy navigates the city with purpose, surveying the streets like it’s a never-ending casting call for her unmatched clients. To her, love has been reduced to a solvable mathematical equation; just give the proverbial whiteboard enough calculation time and eventually the theorem will prove itself.
If that sounds a bit like a defense mechanism to keep love at arm’s length, you betcha it is, because Lucy isn’t interested in partaking in love herself. That is until two potential suitors come knocking at the same time during the reception of a client’s wedding. Henry Castillo (Pascal), the groom’s best man and brother, takes an instant liking to the gorgeous yet emotionally guarded Lucy. They banter and flirt at the single’s table as she tries to recruit him to use her company, and they’re interrupted by a familiar face from her past, former serious boyfriend and current catering waiter, John (Evans).
Where Lucy and Henry connect in their appreciation and aspirations for the finer things, Lucy and John slip into a comfortable reunion hug like two people that carry the weight and warmth of a shared history. Suddenly, Lucy’s shifted into the client’s seat as she gingerly explores the attractive fantasy of dating private equity “unicorn” Henry, while also easily reconnecting with John, who remains a starving artist actor, stalled economically and career-wise. In fact, his lack of upward mobility, and his pronounced frustrations around that perceived failure, is what ultimately killed their serious relationship when they were in their twenties. As a formerly poor kid, Lucy made it clear she had more ambitious material goals and it created a wedge they couldn’t overcome, genuine feelings or not.
In lesser dramedy/rom com hands, the almost too gorgeous, love triangle dynamics of this trio would play out in tired tropes, dewey needle drops and pat outcomes. But Song is clearly a student and unabashed appreciator of the genre. She has no interest in feeding the genre’s sappiest instincts and is intentional in elevating the conversation about why attaining love remains a singular obsession of our species. She also makes a convincing case in Materialists that humanity is currently blowing it by reducing love to something to be solved by algorithmic computations.
As a writer, Song continues to craft such thoughtful and frank dialogue between her characters, and finds wonderful vessels to express these lofty ideals through Johnson, Pascal and Evans. Each of them are allowed to be grownups who wrestle with their flaws and disappointments, and take one other for granted. Song has a particular gift for making the mundanities of life engrossing, and she gets some great performances out of her actors, particularly Evans who is so achingly honest with his feelings that he sways not only Lucy but also the audience with his non-cloying earnestness.
Song also uses Lucy’s matchmaking duties as a provocative bellwether for what it means to look for and find love today. In sequences that pay homage to When Harry Met Sally’s confessionals, Lucy interviews her male and female clients to ascertain their non-negotiables and we bear witness to their unreasonable demands that are solely focused on granular physical, age and personality requirements. Where Lucy’s female clients softly capitulate away from their lists due to desperation, her male clients remain rigid in their “hot model” checklists. And never the twain shall meet. It’s exhausting, and softly prods her to examine her own perhaps unfair standards. Then the other shoe drops when Lucy’s career confidence is decimated in the face of a real crisis that provides a sea change in her perspective about this love thing that she’s taken for granted for quite some time.
It’s not often that a rom com/dramedy works so hard to not be the very thing it purports to be until it feels earned. But Song labors with purpose, executing skilled character work and intimate, honest conversations to earn her swoon-worthy Materialists climax and resolution. Her ability to satisfy the rom com aficionado and the genre dismissive is pretty miraculous. But Song achieves the impossible based on the profundity of her thesis, which connects both perspectives. Yes, a romantic connection will always remain a bit primal and binary in what it represents for each gender. But it’s also ineffable and in itself an act of bravery that everybody understands and wants for themselves.
Director: Celine Song
Writer: Celine Song
Stars: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal
Release Date: June 13, 2025
Tara Bennett is a Los Angeles-based writer covering film, television and pop culture for publications such as SFX Magazine, NBC Insider, IGN and more. She’s also written official books on Sons of Anarchy, Outlander, Fringe, The Story of Marvel Studios, Avatar: The Way of Water and the latest, The Art of Ryan Meinerding. You can follow her on Twitter @TaraDBennett or Instagram @TaraDBen
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