Is there a more competitive dating scene than New York City’s? It makes sense a story about a matchmaker would be set there, but Materialists actually starts in prehistoric times, with two early hominids mid-woo. There are tender looks and flowers exchanged, but also, a pouch of tools shown off like a boast: See what I bring to the table? The message is plain: Love has always been transactional.
That’s the philosophy of Manhattan matchmaker Lucy (Johnson), at least. She is looking to land good business deals for her clients – not in strictly financial terms, although these are by and large staggeringly rich people whose love lives she’s managing – but in a more holistic way. She wants to tick as many boxes as possible, in the process helping her clients determine what are their non-negotiables, where to make compromises, and how to reframe the narrative in their head so they don’t feel bought and sold like a cow.
Lucy is adept at code-switching, nurturing with her clients, then blunt with her colleagues about said clients’ “market value.” She is warm but guarded with a so-called unicorn – tall, handsome, and rich finance guy Harry (Pascal) – who she’s trying to land as a client; he’d prefer to just date Lucy himself. She meets Harry at the wedding of another union she successfully brokered, on the same night she bumps into her ex John (Evans), a struggling actor and cater waiter. With John, the code collapses completely, Johnson replacing Lucy’s usual poise with the body language of a teenager leaning into someone she’s crushing on hard.
“Love triangle” is too pat. Writer-director Celine Song just may be our budding poet laureate of the woman caught in between – not only between two men, but two competing visions of a future. In her Oscar-nominated debut, 2023’s transcendent Past Lives, an émigré reconnects with her Korean childhood sweetheart, weighing their what-might-have-been against the tangible present tense she shares with her American husband. Materialists tenders another sharp contrast – between financial security with the attentive, strikingly confident Harry, or something more engine-revving with John, a broke 37-year-old grump still living with roommates.
“Love triangle” also implies more fireworks than what transpires; these men are way too 21st century enlightened to tussle over Lucy in a canned rom-com sort of way. Refreshingly, this is a dialogue-heavy comic drama about adults who’ve been around the block. They can articulate their wants and insecurities. If the film overplays the love-as-business conceit – conversations occasionally feel like they’ve been run through an Investments 101 Jargon Generator – there is also a rare honesty here about how much money matters and how much its absence can strain a relationship, recalling Jane Austen’s more pragmatic heroines assessing the marriage market, or Whit Stillman’s gimlet-eyed class comedies.
Song has a way with gesturing at a lifetime of experience without overdetailing it. We don’t need to know anybody’s exact childhood traumas. Instead, what comes into focus with Lucy, John, and Harry – and the many hopeful daters Lucy counsels – is that no matter the work you have done, be it cosmetic or on a therapist’s couch, you’re always on the inside gonna be the fat kid or the short kid or the kid with the wonky nose whose parents split up, and you carry that forward, forever. You carry it bodily – witnessed in the way Johnson softens her posture when she reconnects with her old love, or the way Pascal’s broad shoulders cave when Harry allows himself to be vulnerable.
“Allows” is the word for it: Individually, the three leads (all extremely watchable) present a micro-study in humans a little at war with themselves – over who they’re supposed to be, and be with, and what they most value in a relationship when they’re really being honest about it. Materialists is messy in a good way – there’s a lot to chew on here, and Lucy in particular feels recognizably unresolved – but as good as Song is at succinctly compacting her characters’ past lives, I struggled to entirely understand what everybody in the present was thinking. That mystery might be fun on a first date, but as a romance, Materialists left me wanting more.
This article appears in June 13 • 2025.
