"Modern Love in a Material World: Celine Song's 'Materialists' Exposes the Brutal Math of Dating"

In Materialists, director Celine Song (Past Lives) focuses her keen insight on contemporary romance, creating a film that is both harsh and heartfelt—a love story suited for the era of algorithm-driven dating and status-obsessed swipes. Drawing from Song’s personal experience as a high-end matchmaker in New York, the film centers on Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a clever and strategic matchmaker who thrives at connecting Manhattan’s elite yet finds it challenging to balance love’s stark calculations with its chaotic truths. 

Lucy’s job is simple: broker relationships between the wealthy and the beautiful, translating human connection into spreadsheets of compatibility. “I was acting like a stock market trader,” Song recalls of her own matchmaking days. “People talked about partners like cars—six figures, six feet, the right pedigree.” Johnson’s Lucy is a master of this game, until two men upend her carefully constructed logic: Harry (Pedro Pascal), a polished, self-optimized “unicorn” who checks every box, and John (Chris Evans), a broke, stubbornly idealistic ex who reminds her that love isn’t always a transaction.  

Song frames love as the “last ideology”—something we cling to even as we com-modify it. The film’s most unsettling moments come when Lucy and Harry negotiate their worth aloud, treating romance like a merger. Yet Materialists isn’t cynical. Like Past Lives, it finds warmth in the contradictions, suggesting that even in a world of dehumanizing dating apps, vulnerability still slips through. “Love is a mystery to everyone,” Song says. “But we trivialize it—call it ‘just dating.’ Why?”  

Johnson gives an outstanding performance as Lucy, skillfully blending cold precision with deep desire. In contrast, Evans showcases his shaggy charm as John, while Pascal—stepping out of his usual role—uncovers the vulnerability hidden beneath Harry’s flawless exterior. “Who could make Chris Evans feel like a loser?” Song jokes. “Pedro Pascal in a Tom Ford suit.”  

Song rejects genre clichés, drawing instead from Victorian novels (Pride and Prejudice was a touchstone) to explore love’s class warfare. The outcome is a love story that is both excitingly contemporary and breathtakingly real. As Lucy discovers, the equations of dating never quite balance. Yet, love, in all its illogical splendor, could very well justify the errors in calculation.  

Materialists don't just dissect modern relationships—it dares to believe in them anyway.

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