Film review: Materialists

Directed by Celine Song (R)

★★★

Celine Song's follow-up to Past Lives, a 2023 Best Picture nominee, is "not at all what it looks like at first blush," said Kate Erbland in IndieWire. Yes, it's about a beautiful woman who's split between two handsome men, and it has A-listers Dakota Johnson, Pedro Pascal, and Chris Evans in those headline roles. But Materialists is no glossy rom-com. Instead, with her second film, Song "has turned the genre inside out to show us how shallow these stories can be." She's exploring "the limits of what love can do for someone," and there's a chance here that both suitors are bad options for our heroine. Johnson's Lucy is a professional matchmaker who's grown cynical about love, and it's a fitting role, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. The actress "excels at playing skeptics who are privately amused by the shenanigans of attaching yourself to another person." Lucy, torn between a suave finance guy (Pascal) and a struggling actor (Evans), decided long ago that she'd only marry for money, and the film's "ferociously hilarious" first hour has its jaded heroine saying and doing "all the crass things that usually belong to the rom-com villainess."

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Alas, Song starts repeating herself, then "slaps on a happy ending that you simply don't think she believes." But even though the film forfeits its chance to become a "fascinatingly bleak" take on hetero relationships, said Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair, "Materialists is successfully seductive, eventually revealing a few potential deal-breakers but otherwise proving an engaging date. I wanted to fall in love, as I had with Past Lives. But a diverting, heady fling will do, too."