The Materialists: a Film Review

🎬 The Materialists dir. Celine Song (2025)

📍 Saw at the cinema

★★★★☆ 4/5: Counter-Gaze Engaged

TW: mentions of sexual assault

SPOILERS AHEAD

It is rare for me to not have a definite opinion when I come out of a film, and I have to say that three days after seeing The Materialists, I am still left unsure. I loved it but I found it hard to rate.

First of all, I was absolutely captivated throughout the whole movie, but I must say that even after listening to various podcasts and reading reviews and articles I still feel lost as to the clear message of the movie beyond the simple narrative of should we date for love or financial security. I gather that the film seeks to demonstrate how we commodify ourselves for love while juxtaposing two types of masculinity in crisis. But I consider that Song, despite her clear intentions in interviews, got lost in the end product. Dakota Johnson as this affectless professional woman in New York who seeks value and to be valued and is forced to choose between love and logic, calculation vs connection, lacked something in my opinion. I would have liked to see more emotion in the portrayal of Lucy, Johnson’s character, and I wonder as to what the reasoning behind her casting was. Was she a second option or was it intentional to make her into a type of adult robot? This works perfectly for her job as a matchmaker. She is unsentimental, cold and calculating, and sees marriage as a business proposal. The storyline depends on this kind of archetype of this love triangle where the girl has to pick between essentially the new perfect rich man on paper vs the poor but nostalgic ex. However, I kind of craved a third option of either Lucy deciding that being single sufficed or a third man who was a more well-rounded alternative. Chris Evans’ character, a struggling actor at the ripe age of 37 still stuck in a tiny and disgusting shared apartment, is, for a lack of a better word, a poor alternative to the charming and well-accomplished Pedro Pascal. Yes, they differ in socio-economic backgrounds with Pedro’s character coming from money and you eventually find out Pedro’s character did succumb to the pressures of bodily insecurities. But I consider Evans’ character John to be useless, he doesn’t actually bring anything to the table, he’s not poor AND funny or poor AND ambitious, he’s just poor and (somewhat) there for her?? He’s still stuck in the dream of “making it” as an actor, which raises the question of when is it the right time to give up, to compromise? Is it worth pursuing something that might never eventually happen? We often hear about breakout stars talking about how “broke” they were, but what happens to when that breakout never happens? Dakota’s Lucy illustrates the perfect adult, focused on her endgame, with a decluttered apartment, she has it together. But she appears emotionless, you don’t know why Evans wants her and we just rely on the understanding that they have a past together. Is there no middle ground between the weird corporate who only takes you to fancy restaurants and a bum with whom you share past with? I feel there was a part missing that would justify Lucy’s choice in picking Evans even though we do see the lack of ANY chemistry between Lucy and Pascal. Evans is on the periphery and not in competition with Pascal, but he just feels like a nightmare of a match for a fully accomplished professional Dakota Johnson. He’s still stuck in his ways from when they last broke up which was nearly ten years before they met again in the film. Johnson’s character seeks him out of comfortability and in my opinion her decision to be with him just felt like settling. Yes, he was there when she needed someone to talk to but isn’t that the bare minimum? It felt like she was clinging to a past that wasn’t exactly healthy in the first place. It almost felt like an existential decision to pick one or the other, a decision between life and death... I would have loved for the message of the movie to be that yes the dating market is risky and that despite us thinking that we have evolved from a Jane Austen business-like marriage proposal, capitalism has commodified today’s dating market. For which Chris Evans’ character breaks the foregrounded cynical materiality and Johnson as the representation of the modern middle-class professional woman to choose herself amidst the societal pressure on women in their 30s to settle down.   

Moreover, this film was framed as the new era of romantic comedies and in some sense I concur but in a way that The Materialists was only marketed as a romantic comedy to subvert the genre. I am a massive fan of Celine Song from her first film Past Lives. The poetry created through the directing and cinematography and how it articulated nostalgia, the feeling of being stuck between two cultures, bilingualism and love was just perfect. I was left stunned and mystified by her style and depth and fervently looked forward to her next project. When I saw the marketing for The Materialists as a romantic comedy, I have to say I was quite disappointed and worried that she had fallen to the demands of commercial cinema. However, after seeing this film, I can confidently say that it was most definitely not a romantic comedy, and I could even question if this film actually believes in pure love at all. The romantic comedy genre expects relatability through which comes naturalism in acting, however Lucy’s matchmaking industry didn’t feel like they were dealing with people. The dialogue and the tonality highlight a world that revolves around maths. Dakota is ruthless and unruffled from being engulfed in such a world. She treats romance, dating and marriage through such an economic materialist lens that it almost seems inhuman. Could we then deduce that this film pushes a narrative that we as people are actually not wrapped in a bundle of wonderful qualities waiting to be awakened by love and we are in fact economically and spiritually materialistic. What if this type of happy ending is not in play for us at all? This film felt like a counterfactual exercise. Evans’ character is kind of nice and Dakota is quite flawed yet she chooses him, does the film even believe that they should end up together, or is this film’s mission statement an illustration of a modern reality of love that is victim of neoliberal capitalist brain-washing pressure. Capitalism has rendered us disposable. The aspirations of love are demonstrated as risky where in this capitalist individualist society we are all alone in pursuit of what we think is love but in fact is to feel valuable. Romantic comedy films have always reflected back the evolution of women’s socio-economic and political circumstances through cinema. The female fantasy was once to be swept up by a rich providing man, which evolved to rom coms in the 80s of women pursuing careers and the having it all discourse. Career and love fulfilment was now the new norm for rom com narratives. However, in today’s age, we enter a crisis as the genre needs to sell the empowered woman fantasy back to women who are now unsure as to how they want to see themselves. In this crisis, the issue of masculinity comes into question as well which has become very prevalent with the rise of the manosphere and inceldom. The Materialists demonstrates two visions of masculinity in crisis. Pascal as the traditional archetype of masculinity, suave, husband material, provider figure but has physical insecurities on his own marketability, his ability to attract. Evans as a man who barely can provide for himself and dissatisfied with his situation but physically flawless. This is an interesting take in regards to this growing propaganda emphasis on this so-called “high value man” a refrain from the manosphere of “80% of women only want 20% of men”. This relates to this idea of scarcity of women only seeking a superman type, old-fashion archetype of masculinity as provider. This film’s depiction of marketability and love highlights how the patriarchal heterosexual love match is reasserting itself in today’s love market. You can see glimpses of the emotional labour that the matchmaking business disregards when thinking of the process of the dating market. When we start to view people as numbers or means to an end we run the risk of overlooking their humanity or other. Women on screen are having to re-calibrate their wants and needs in regards to love in a society that pushes for a type of patriarchal capitalist efficency and risk. The film successfully foregrounds the materiality of the dating market and shows the great risk to dating violence. Sophie’s narrative of sexual assault as a direct illustration of the risk of violence is very interesting. I did not find it exploitative or sensationalised. It showed the harms that can be caused by focusing solely on what works on paper. The value system is denounced as dangerous and very harmful, it literally broke a man in Pascal’s case.

---

★★★★☆ 4/5: Counter-Gaze Engaged:

The Materialists is a beautiful and captivating film that subverts the romantic comedy genre by offering a type of political radicalness in between fairytale and cynicism. This film explores how heterosexual women are fighting against resource hoarding brainwashing propaganda in an era of rising inceldom and the so-called “male loneliness epidemic”. The film offers a voyeuristic view into a world of white American middle-class people dating in New York city where class differences are positioned as nearly existential as Evans’ is portrayed as almost in danger of precarity. This middle-class is fraying and falling apart where patriarchal neoliberal dating scene is pushing forward this narrative of prosperity only being successful with a Pedro Pascal type of masculinity. I really enjoyed it, but I find it hard to give it a 5/5: Reclaimed Gaze as I do feel that this film was missing something to fully depict the complexities of the female love fantasy in our modern age. If she had decided to stay single or there were a third more fully-rounded option then that would have warranted a perfect score, but I just left the film disappointed with her choice. If I could, I would give it a 4.5/5.