A matchmaker is torn between marrying for money or marrying for love in Celine Song’s Materialists.

Dating has always been a minefield, and in today’s app-driven world, it’s become a statistical landscape: swipes, metrics, algorithms. In this context, Materialists explores the commodification of people; how personality and compatibility get distilled into numerical values, and how intimacy itself risks becoming transactional.

Lucy (Dakota Johnson) is a matchmaker offering a boutique service for wealthy clients unwilling to do the emotional labour themselves. Praised early on for orchestrating nine marriages, Lucy is professionally adept but personally disengaged. Her self-assigned flaw: she reduces people -including herself- to data points. It’s a deeply internalised worldview born of detachment and buried self-loathing, masked by aloof confidence. Johnson’s performance is appropriately restrained; poised and unreadable.

The narrative hinges on her subdued encounters with Harry (Pedro Pascal), a wealthy suitor who checks every box, and John (Chris Evans), an ex whose life is a mess but ignites something real. The triangle isn’t a battle of affections, as neither man is in direct competition with the other, but a slow clash between Lucy’s heart and spreadsheeted mind. Harry offers financial security and emotional simplicity; John provides passion and instability. Her internal algorithm isn’t equipped to weigh these things.

Pascal and Evans are solid, but secondary. They function as thematic tools more than full characters, which suits the film’s clinical tone. That tone is deliberate: Materialists resembles an essay more than a traditional romcom, using its narrative to test hypotheses and observe outcomes. That intellectual approach limits emotional payoff, but it’s a compelling formal choice.

Where Materialists excels is in its portrayal of the dating industrial complex. Clients list ideal traits with unsettling shallowness, reducing love to checklists. Lucy, despite her professional polish, contributes to this commodification, believing in compatibility but blind to the messiness of humanity. Yet as the film progresses, her algorithms falter, and she’s forced to reassess whether love can be found in numbers.

The story deliberately bypasses grand gestures, angst or picturesque dates, opting instead for quiet observations about relational mechanics. That restraint is mostly effective, but occasionally undercuts emotional engagement. A late attempt at dramatic tension feels out of place, shaking the film’s otherwise measured aesthetic.

Ultimately, Materialists doesn’t seek to fix the algorithm. It accepts the continued dominance of swipes and stats. But Lucy changes; her recalibration is subtle and believable. Song’s film may disappoint genre traditionalists, but it leaves behind something deeper: a provocation to examine the way we measure love, and whether measurement should matter at all.

---

Verdict

A compelling meditation on modern dating, wrapped in the shell of a romcom but driven by analysis over emotion.

We’d love to know your thoughts on this and anything else you want to discuss. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, BlueSky and Discord or just leave a comment in the comment section below. You’ll need an account for Disqus but it’s easy to set up. Don’t forget to share your rating in the “User Review” box.