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There’s something slyly hypnotic about Materialists, a film that pretends to be aloof while quietly peeling its skin back. Directed by Celine Song with a kind of hushed confidence, the film presents itself like a minimalist showroom — all polished surfaces, curated emotions, and immaculate lighting — yet it’s in this sterile space that something oddly real begins to ferment.
This isn’t your average romcom. In fact, it's barely romantic, and rarely funny in the traditional sense. Instead, Materialists is a character study dressed in the sleek, bloodless wardrobe of a genre it is actively trying to dismantle. It’s concerned with money, possession(s), manners, dating apps, power dynamics — and the subtle violence of choosing someone not because you love them, but because they fit the image of a life you think you’re supposed to want.
At the centre of it is Lucy, played with surgical precision by Dakota Johnson — a woman whose motivations seem constantly in motion, flickering beneath a passive exterior. She’s not cold, just constantly adjusting and unable to settle for anything less than her dream ideals. A matchmaker by profession, she understands better than anyone how people sort, rank, and discard each other. Her romantic life operates under the same logic. With the same swipe left-ist attitude.
There’s Harry, the rich older man she’s with for much of the film — affable, successful, emotionally composed, everything you would want from the uber-sophisticated man on the front cover of Vogue. And there’s John, a blue-collar ex who shows up again, unsettling the tidy algorithm she’s built her life around. Their triangle isn’t about romance in the sweeping, sentimental sense. It’s about class, stability, identity, and desire — desire not just for a person, but for a version of oneself that feels more vivid.
The film excels in how emotionally understated it is. You never feel overwhelmed by the performances — no melodramatic shouting matches or tear-streaked revelations. Conversations hang in the air like mist. The camera lingers in quiet rooms. The silences are long, but never empty. And this tone works — mostly. It captures the numbness of modern relationships, how so much of dating now feels like shopping in an overlit department store: everything neatly labelled, nothing deeply felt.
But then there's the ending.
It’s here that the film stumbles — or perhaps sprints when it should have walked. After maintaining a rhythm of restraint and ambiguity, Materialists suddenly collapses time. Lucy leaves Harry and reconnects with John — all within a single day — and by the end, the narrative gently insists they might just try again. It’s not the choice itself that feels false, but the speed with which it happens. For a film that spent so long deconstructing the mechanics of relationships, it rushes headfirst into the very type of closure it previously avoided. It feels out of step — not because people don’t make impulsive decisions, but because this story had trained us to expect deeper ambivalence.
And maybe that’s the point — that in a world full of choices, endless profiles, and curated partners, there’s no right answer, only the next move. But still, it sits awkwardly. It’s not that Lucy chooses John. It’s that the film doesn’t let us sit with the emotional cost of that choice.
That said, there’s a lot to admire. The cast is uniformly strong. Chris Evans, shedding the superhero veneer, plays John with a soft, slightly bruised charm. Pedro Pascal is disarmingly subtle as Harry, never villainous, just grounded in a different emotional economy. The dynamic between all three is compelling — not because sparks fly, but because none of them are quite on the same page, ever. It’s deliciously awkward, which is far more interesting than chemistry.
What Materialists captures best is the quiet alienation of dating in a hyper-capitalist world. It understands how love has become transactional, how we scan for compatibility like job interviews, how power and security dress up as romance. It's a film that dares to be emotionally sterile — not because it lacks feeling, but because it reflects the way people mask it.
And in that sterility, there's something haunting. Something human.
It's not a film for romantics, really. It’s for people who’ve stared at a dating profile and felt absolutely nothing. For people who’ve been loved by someone "perfect on paper" and still walked away. For people who’ve left someone not because they weren’t good enough, but because something ineffable — some flicker of truth — just didn’t spark. Materialists captures that contradiction: how love can be logical, and still wrong.
It’s not flawless. It ends too quickly. It ties too neat a bow. But for much of its runtime, it holds up a mirror and quietly asks: Are you choosing someone because you love them — or because you're afraid not to?
8/10
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