Materialists (2025)

There’s a quiet kind of courage in the way Celine Song approaches Materialists. Rather than following the path laid by her acclaimed debut, Past Lives, she turns inward, offering a film that feels more like a private meditation than a conventional follow-up. It’s a story shaped by doubt, reflection, and emotional ambivalence. As I watched, I found myself not just observing the characters, but considering my own past—the times I chose safety over risk, the compromises I made between what felt right and what seemed wise.

The story follows Lucy, who runs a high-end matchmaking agency in Manhattan. Dakota Johnson portrays her with a calm reserve, suggesting a woman who has become an expert in other people’s relationships while holding her own emotions at a distance. She pairs clients with precision, approaching love almost like a science—something to be managed, understood, contained. But when her former partner, John, re-enters her life at a wedding where she also meets Harry, a wealthy financier, the story turns. It becomes an exploration of how we come to desire what we’re told is desirable, and how easily that can blur the line between what we want and what we need.

What’s striking about Song’s writing is her refusal to cast anyone as purely admirable or purely flawed. Each character is shaped with care, and each is understandable, even when their choices are painful. John, played with gentle weariness by Chris Evans, isn’t framed as the romantic artist ruined by Lucy’s pragmatism. He’s someone whose financial instability placed real pressure on their relationship—someone whose inability to share in everyday responsibilities gradually wore thin. You sense how repeated small failures could erode love, how the emotional strain of unpaid bills and cancelled plans slowly accumulates. Harry, in contrast, could easily have become a caricature of wealth and ease. But Pedro Pascal gives him surprising depth. In one quietly affecting moment, he opens up about cosmetic surgery—not as vanity, but as vulnerability—and something shifts. He no longer seems polished or distant. He seems human, and perhaps, like everyone else in the film, a little unsure of how to be loved.

Johnson’s performance is quietly revelatory. In earlier roles she’s sometimes seemed slightly removed, but here that distance becomes central to who Lucy is. This is someone who’s made a career out of understanding emotional patterns, but who struggles to trust her own. Johnson allows the tension beneath Lucy’s composed surface to register in the smallest gestures—in the way she listens, hesitates, changes the subject. And when that composure finally slips, the effect is not dramatic but deeply felt. It feels earned.

The authenticity of the film is grounded not only in emotional truth, but in Song’s personal history. Before becoming a filmmaker, she spent time working as a matchmaker herself—an experience that clearly informs the film’s texture and tone. She understands the strange duality of that role: being intimately involved in other people’s romantic hopes while managing the pressures of one’s own practical needs. The film bears the marks of that insight. There’s no sentimentality about the tension between love and security. Lucy’s choices feel shaped by hard experience, by the kind of financial anxiety that leaves lasting imprints. The desire for stability isn’t portrayed as cynicism—it’s shown as a deeply human response to vulnerability.

Visually, the film is beautifully rendered. Shot on 35mm by Shabier Kirchner, New York looks textured and luminous—romantic in moments, but never idealised. The contrast between the spaces Lucy moves through is striking. Harry’s elegant, sparsely furnished apartment is emotionally sterile despite its luxury, while John’s cluttered, chaotic flat—though far less comfortable—feels alive with creativity and warmth. Each setting reflects not just the men, but the futures they represent. They feel like real possibilities, not symbolic opposites.

Midway through, though, the film begins to slow. The deliberate pacing that allows the emotional details to unfold with care starts to feel overextended. Scenes stretch a little too long, and the direction of the story becomes clearer than it needs to be. The final act still feels honest—it arises naturally from Lucy’s arc—but the sense of discovery that marked the beginning gives way to something more expected.

There’s also a subplot involving one of Lucy’s clients, who is sexually assaulted on a date Lucy helped arrange. Song treats this with seriousness and sensitivity, using it to examine the ethical limits of matchmaking and the unpredictability of human behaviour. It deepens the film’s engagement with themes of trust and responsibility. Still, it alters the tone, bringing in a note of gravity that feels somewhat removed from the rest of the film’s emotional register. Some may find the shift jarring.

What holds the film together, despite these turns, is Song’s consistent interest in how people make sense of their own choices. She is less concerned with what her characters do than with how they explain their actions to themselves—how those explanations hold up under pressure, and what happens when they start to fail. Lucy is someone who’s spent years treating emotional connection as a professional tool. But what happens when those carefully honed instincts no longer serve her? When she realises that understanding love is not the same as feeling it?

These questions feel especially resonant now. For many, the pressures of modern life have made romantic idealism harder to sustain. The film recognises that love and security aren’t opposites—but neither are they easy to reconcile. Most lasting relationships sit somewhere between longing and compromise, shaped by tenderness, routine, effort, and the slow accumulation of trust. Materialists doesn’t offer answers. Instead, it gives voice to the questions—openly, honestly, and with great care.

When Lucy finally makes her choice, it doesn’t come as a surprise. It feels inevitable, not because the story is predictable, but because her growth makes it so. The decision carries weight because we understand what it’s cost her to get there. We see how she has changed, not in grand gestures, but in the quiet reshaping of what she believes she deserves—and what she can no longer live without.

Materialists is thoughtful, emotionally intelligent filmmaking. It doesn’t rush to resolve its questions, nor does it offer easy catharsis. It trusts us to sit with ambiguity, to recognise ourselves in flawed decisions, and to see love not just as a feeling, but as a choice shaped by circumstance and experience. While it may not have the crystalline focus of Past Lives, it confirms Celine Song as a filmmaker unafraid to linger in complexity—and gifted enough to make it feel utterly real.