Celine Song the auteur, for better or worse

On Materialists

I was talking to a friend of mine who is gearing up to script her second feature, always a pivotal moment for any creative. It’s a chance to solidify your voice, maybe even signal the kind of artist you intend to be. All of the ideas she floated sounded like natural extensions of first film, rooted in the same world and carrying forward its particular eccentricities.

Then we saw an actual second feature: Celine Song’s Materialists, a who-will-she choose romantic drama that reinforces the playwright-turned-filmmaker’s thematic preoccupations, (limited) cinematic style, and writing foibles—most troublingly, a resistance to crafting psychologically-rich characters.

In what’s less of a performance than a long, dispassionate sigh, Dakota Johnson, my least favorite nepo baby (so much wasted potential), plays Lucy, a successful, high-end matchmaker with a hand in at least nine marriages, but not her own. Early in the film, her coworkers (she works at an agency called Adore, the only thing I will likely remember from this movie)—toast her on yet another proposal sparked by her careful calculations. After all, the secret to a good match she insists, is just math. Upon meeting a rich, single man Harry (Pedro Pascal), she describes her job in the most unsexy way possible as part undertaker and insurance agent—a cold equation of risk, compatibility, and return—and her clients in terms of bankable traits, as measurable, sortable, portfolios.

The mapping of financial vernacular onto people isn’t particularly new, though always a little gross. In Materialists this type of detached talk isn’t played for laughs but delivered by its principal characters with a sleek, perhaps unintentional irony, particularly the scenes where Lucy and Harry, himself a symbol of high-net-worth desirability, evaluate themselves like asset classes. Enter John (Chris Evans, the film’s bright spot, operating at a clear level above his co-stars), a struggling actor and Lucy’s ex, whose lack of prospects form the counterweight to Harry’s polished world. Their performances are underplayed and tamped down—murmured revelations about feelings, the kind that suggest depth without earning it. Song’s films are populated by archetypes and ciphers, a complaint lodged against Past Lives (2024), though there, the three actors, each equally mesmerizing, made the flatness work for their roles. At least then, you could project something onto them.

Ultimately, Song’s characters are vessels for her lofty ideas crafted exclusively to spout her thesis rather than develop organically as dimensional beings. “People are people are people are people. They come as they are,” says Lucy gently rebuffing a particularly picky client who wants to commission a match the way you would a Build-a-Bear. Yet Song herself does the same, reducing her characters into a polished inventory of presentable traits.

• Lucy, mid 30s, gorgeous, sharp-edged cynic.

• John, mid 30s, tall, handsome charming, struggling actor with three roommates.

• Harry, mid 40s, tall handsome, charming, monied equity investor with a tribeca apartment.

Marrying for money—or viewing marriage as a business proposition—is neither new, nor radical, nor even particularly scandalous. (A peek at tiktok reveals a robust cheering section for Pascal’s rich suitor.) But Materialists fails to press further. Most of us know women—smart, self-aware women—who heavily or solely factor in financial stability when considering a spouse. Though not a single one of them I know addresses it directly. Materialists should have. “Value” and the desire to feel valuable come up repeatedly, but the concept—and what it actually means in 2025—is never fully examined.

The most fascinating feature of Materialists is how weirdly outdated it feels—an attempt to channel Jane Austen through a modern, metropolitan filter that arrives as something muddled, unfunny, and quite frankly, not very romantic. The fashion-set have rightly questioned Lucy’s ability to afford Bottega sandals and Proenza Schouler gowns on an $80K salary while living alone in Manhattan. But perhaps this is precisely the debt she speaks of, another missed opportunity for Song to explore the urban pressures of looking rich and performing wealth. More nuanced class dynamics are on display in single episode of Gossip Girl.

Harry and Lucy are almost always in restaurants, their relationship unfolding primarily across a series of dinner dates that serve as upscale stages for expository dialogue, merely tables where their love-belief systems are unpacked. (Song’s one consistent instinct is to make conversation the entire architecture of the film. Not natural, exactly—but relentless enough that you stop questioning it.) It wasn’t until I started mentally listing the restaurants that it hit me: there’s no small talk, no stray gestures that tell us who these people actually are. What is cinema if not watching someone flip a menu, pick up a fork, fumble a joke. Song denies us all of texture, clearing the frame of anything that might get in the way of her message.

Credit is due to the location scout. The restaurants—Nobu, Altro Paradise—all belong to a class of luxury standby, sceney but predictable, the food tasty but timid, too new to be venerable, mirroring the characters as polished, affectless surfaces. “I don’t know if I like you or the restaurants you take me to,” Lucy says conflating material desire and affection, the height of the film’s examination of such.

A beer and a coke, to show how unique I am.

When my mother married my father, he was woefully unemployed and she was banking 80k in the 80s (!!). She always tells us she married him for his potential. I was reminded of this while thinking of John’s vague future. Are we to understand that he’s simply untalented? That he has no alternate ambitions? Could he, at the very least, find cleaner roommates? We’re given nothing—except that he’s poor, and in love, his only meaningful attributes.

If marriage is indeed a financial decision, then even love matches involve some form of economic reasoning. But for Song everything is binary. Rich or poor. Clean or sloppy. Motivated by a childhood with struggling parents and no recourse or healing in sight. Have there been no suitors for Lucy that are solvent and soulful? Slightly less rich but sparking some minimum of romantic interest? Apparently not, or obviously not considered. By the end Lucy’s impending relationship seems to have simply befallen her. Still in the grips of theater, Songs thinks in metaphors and dismisses the ample possibilities of cinema, isolating her characters into their own tiny planets.

Romantic dramas thrive on the energy of side characters, but here, they’re practically nonexistent—two female characters have no friends to call in times of crisis. Instead, we get a weighty subplot involving sexual assault—jarring given the breezy rom-com tenor the A24 marketing department so casually suggested with the trailer—that drags the film somehow both down and forward; it supplies a conflict touching the main story, but is less a narrative than narrative excuse that lets Lucy stew in guilt and gives Song a chance to wag a finger at the matchmaking industry, her former realm.

Spoilers ahead.

Song’s Materialists wants to subvert the rom-com, and maybe it does, accidentally—flirting with some tropes, discarding others, and never quite signaling where it intends to land. (The pleasure of watching a genre film is derived at least in part by its fulfillment of its conventions.)

Lucy chooses love, yet the film treats her decision as a flaw, one that comes at the cost of lifelong financial instability. It’s as if romance + economic ruin are a package deal, and having love over money a kind of aesthetic failure. The characters don’t look explicitly unhappy, but it feels like their smiles are colored by the awareness that they’ve opted for something less than ideal, at least by the world’s logic. That, or the film has done a fine job of dulling any sharper feeling.

That so many viewers were frustrated by the ending for whatever reason might suggest that Song has struck a nerve with her ambivalence. Or more like, she just can't articulate her own argument.

ODDS, ENDS, AND ANTIDOTES

• Lucy carries what I initially mistook for a Khaite Lotus bag—it’s actually Hereu.

• It feels like a personal affront when Celine Song uses my beloved Cat Power.

• Not one, but two Succession alums—Zoë Winters and Dasha Nekrasova—play supporting roles.

• Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey (1988) gives us a woman contemplating the love-versus-money in New York with far more verve and emotional clarity.

• Celine Song’s list of filmic inspirations for Materialists are generic as they come. I feel like I clocked a different list on social that included a bit more, including When Harry Met Sally, which is visually quoted towards the end of the film.

• Song’s pick for the last movie she’d ever watch: Zootopia.

• I am begging for a traditional romcom starring Chris Evans and Greta Lee.