Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a professional match maker in New York City is contently unlucky in love.  After calling things off with John (Chris Evans), a struggling actor who shares an apartment with two other guys, Lucy focused on her work and bringing other people together.  Charlotte (Louisa Jacobson), a previous client, invites Lucy to her wedding where she meets Harry (Pedro Pascal), brother and best man to the groom.  Despite their vastly differing circumstances, Lucy begins to entertain the possibility of a relationship with Harry because he checks off many of her boxes, namely, wealth. 

Celine Song writes and directs Materialists for A24, a 116-minute follow-up to her swooning, missed connections drama Past Lives (2023).  Eschewing a festival release, the title opened wide on just shy of 3,000 screens, riding along on a wave of the collective buzz around the hot cast and good will which Song built up from her previous effort.  Materialists feels like a bit of a throwback, not only in how it – or, rather, A24 – chose to represent itself in the lineage of the workplace romantic comedies of decades past, but also a bit of a return to form for the rapidly expanding indie distributor.  That being said, Song’s sophomore effort is more of a romantic drama parading around as a comedy, and without a clear sense of its own identity, the cast suffers trying to balance their performance with the tone of the film. 

Johnson leads the film, and she makes for a difficult entry into the world given the specific choice arrived at between her and Song in how she handles the dialogue.  More specifically, she hits each line reading with the safe mix of unfazed and disillusionment that she blends into the drab earth and grey tones that dominate the film’s color palette, or she stands out for all the wrong reasons against the few locations that have streaks of more vibrant color about them.  This almost deadpan delivery makes for a very dull leading character, and instead of the wider world lifting her up – or at the very least, giving the audience some side characters to actually enjoy spending time with – the central performance hangs around the neck of the film like a weight.  Further, since she is heavily styled in the same vein as Anne Hathaway circa The Devil Wears Prada (2006), it just makes us think back to the much better films upon which Song is trying to emulate and modernize for the elder millennials. 

When Materialists is embracing being a workplace satire, the film is at its best.  Mixing Prada with something akin to Her (2013) in that Lucy’s job is a hyper extension of modern dating, Song actually stands a shot at saying something here, expressing her frustrations around modern romance and an algorithm that factors people down to a binary series of yes/no responses, spitting out a final tally.  Through the rise of AI, and even before that, just the absolute permeation of social media into every aspect of our lives, dating app frustration has been on the rise so it is not out of the question that a boutique matching service would spring up for the affluent and lonely.  Song could have achieved everything she sought to do just by refocusing the narrative away from on Lucy and onto her clients, but instead she places the weight of her thesis on Johnson’s shoulders and offers the actress a surface level examination across a repetitive script. 

Opposite her for much of the first half of the film is Pascal’s Harry; an actor who is similar neutered by the absolute lack of anything on the page for him to work with.  Like Johnson, Pascal is deadpan throughout, possibly playing into a strange sense of bewilderment, and it is wild to see just how little chemistry these two can muster.  Part of that is intentional as Harry only fills Lucy’s want for money and not her suppressed desire for connection, but for the third act to work, we need to buy into their elevated fling, and it just does not happen.  Pascal comes off almost bored in this performance, and Lucy seems rather disinterested in Harry which further leaves Pascal grasping at straws. 

Turning then to Evans’ John who occupies the back half of the narrative, he is the only of the leading trio that is trying to break from the mundanity which informs his costars’ decisions.  It does not work.  He is too large of a presence to be working in such an opposite register as the rest of his scene partners are so his goofy demeanor runs almost antithetical to the rest of the film.  A more nuanced execution on Song’s behalf may have been able to use this tonal disconnect as a way to break Lucy out of her isolationism, but it is too broad to really home in on any kind of thesis.  Evans is simply set loose to play some hapless, puppy-love character that we, as an audience who is in tune with the tropes and expectations of a romantic comedy, know is the better choice for Lucy between the two, but as a character – and again, this falls on Song as the screenwriter – does little to really prove it.  By having her audience rely on their gut instinct to fill in the gaps left on the page, she does her actors a real disservice as they are unable to foster any connections between them meaning that the audience can never really begin to invest in them. 

Materialists is not a complete misfire as Song does still prove she has an interesting a unique take on love in the modern world, but between the stumbling on the page and the unfair standard set from Past Lives, this film is a real sophomore slump for the writer/director.  Her unrelenting cynicism – well placed, sure – never evolves or grows out so Lucy’s change of heart is spurred mostly into motion by a rather unsatisfactorily handled subplot around her client Sophie (Zoe Winters).  To continue this streak of praise, Winters is the out and away highlight of the entire film, and while her character is grossly mishandled and used as a tool for Lucy’s growth, the few scenes which Winters occupies catapults this stale film into something vibrant. As the sum of its parts, however, the entire exercise is lacking precision, but Song’s voice is not completely drowned out under the rubble of a collapsed narrative, only heavily muted.