In her wistful debut, Past Lives (2023), the writer-director Celine Song explored the Korean concept of inyeon: every relationship is predetermined by fate, specifically the intertwining of two people in their past lives. “It’s inyeon if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush,” its heroine, Nora, explains. “If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of inyeon over 8,000 lifetimes.” In Song’s difficult second album, love is governed by more materialist forces.
According to Lucy (a glossy, inscrutable Dakota Johnson), a professional matchmaker responsible for nine weddings, dating is transactional and marriage a business deal. Her clients are struggling to navigate the “market”, with their lists of deal-breakers and non-negotiables: minimum six feet tall, six-figure salary, hairline holding on in there. Love is not a question of some mysterious, intangible power, but of compatible family backgrounds, financial situations, levels of attractiveness. In other words, Lucy says, “it’s just math”.
Like Past Lives, Materialists concerns a love triangle. Lucy attends the wedding of a client and, before she takes her seat at the singles’ table, must first talk the bride out of calling off the whole thing. The mascara-streaked white puffball on the bed admits she wants to marry her fiancé because he makes her sister jealous; the matchmaker pulls off a complex semantic vault: “So he makes you feel valuable.”
“I do” safely secured, Lucy takes her seat for dinner next to Harry, the brother of the groom. Harry (played by man-of-the-moment Pedro Pascal) is what matchmakers call a “unicorn”, a man who’s too good to be true: tall, wealthy, handsome, charming, with impossibly good taste in flowers. Lucy tries to recruit him as a client; he tries to get her into bed.
That bed is bedecked in sheets so lustrous they must be thrown away at the end of each week, for they would surely not survive anything so workaday as a washing machine. The bed is situated in a $12bn (I know this because Lucy asks him) Tribeca penthouse, handsomely decorated in warm white and walnut. Lucy can’t help but gawp, her eyes moving voraciously, while Harry kisses her neck. They date, and Harry insists he’s interested in her “intangible assets”, but Lucy can’t shake the sense that “the math just doesn’t add up”.
The other complicating factor in the equation is John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor and Lucy’s ex, who just happens to be working as a cater-waiter at the wedding. Uninvited, he plonks down Lucy’s go-to drink order – a pint and a Coke – on the table between her and Harry, as if to say: I know her better than you ever will, mate. They broke up, we learn, because they were broke. It’s a tale as old as romcoms: woman pulled between a man who’s perfect on paper and a man she, despite all rational self-talk, can’t quite let go. Not everything can be explained by “math”.
Song’s script is uneven: some lines are acutely well observed, the back-and-forth a rhythmic rally, others eye-roll inducing. Characters say things like: “You make me brave enough to admit that I want to be happy.” The film skewers modern dating in a depressingly funny series of to-camera monologues in which Lucy’s clients detail their contradictory standards for their prospective partners. One man in his forties claims he wants to meet an older, more mature woman (he usually dates those in their early twenties), but grimaces when she suggests someone 39: he was thinking more like 27… In other moments, I found its objects of fun more uncomfortable. Lucy appears to have no friends, and groups of women, when they appear, are homogenous gaggles: bossy bridesmaids strut in matching satin; hysterical matchmakers jump up and down, squealing.
Materialists is a romcom for the Money Diaries generation: Lucy discloses that she earns $80,000, and the internet asks how she can afford $700 Loeffler Randall knee-high boots. But while it is unusual to hear figures talked about so openly on screen, romcoms have always been about money, or the collision of different social classes: lumbermill worker meets heiress (The Notebook), businessman meets sex worker (Pretty Woman), actress meets bookstore owner (Notting Hill). Ultimately, the question Materialists poses – what is the role of pragmatism in romance? – is far more interesting than its schmaltzy answer: love wins, however illogical or impractical. This we learned in the 2000s.
Still, it is a visual feast: a beautiful picture about beautiful people. There are worse things for a film to be. God knows I’ve swiped right on less.
“Materialists” is in cinemas from 13 August
[See also: 150 years of the bizarre Hans Christian Andersen]
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This article appears in the 07 Aug 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special 2025
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