The “Materialists” Movie Review: When Love Becomes Math, and Desire Gets a Price Tag

There’s a small, acidic laugh that runs under Director Celine Song’s 2025 movie “Materialists” — not a laugh at characters, exactly, but at the cultural math that makes people treat other human beings like line items. Song’s second feature after Past Lives uses the rom-com scaffolding (a love triangle, the neat oppositions of wealth vs. art, safety vs. risk) to ask something sharper: what do we mean when we say we’re “looking for love,” and how much of that search is literal accounting?

The film centers on Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a high-functioning matchmaker whose métier is turning messy human histories into compatibility algorithms. She finds herself pulled between two poles — John, the broke, sweet ex (Chris Evans), and Harry, a wealthy, disarmingly polished suitor (Pedro Pascal) whose physical perfection is not as natural as it seems.

Song folds wry social observation into intimate beats: the result is frequently astute, occasionally frustrating, and frequently alive in the chest.

The film’s answer is pragmatic: no. Money and height can change the conditions of a relationship, but they don’t do the relational work of mutual care, repair, and curiosity.

The Materialists Movie Review: A Tight Synopsis (spoilers ahead, but necessary)

Lucy works at Adore, a boutique matchmaking outfit that sells love as a service — heady for clients and dispassionately transactional for the company. She’s good at turning people into profiles that “add up.”

At a wedding she reconnects with John, now doing odd jobs and acting on the side, while catching the eye of Harry, a financier who could be the “unicorn” in every matchmaker’s ledger.

Complications arrive like the best rom-com complications: an awkward sympathy for John, a magnetic pull toward Harry’s stability, and a darker, quieter subplot when one of Lucy’s clients, Sophie, is sexually assaulted on a date arranged through Adore. That incident cracks Lucy’s professional armor and forces her to confront what duty and care really mean in a business that sells intimacy.

Later, we learn Harry underwent an extreme cosmetic intervention — limb/leg-lengthening surgery — to increase his height, a revelation that reframes his polish as both pain and performance. By the end, Song refuses an easy moralizing payoff: Lucy’s choices are moral questions without tidy answers, and the film is less about a triumphant “choice” than about how people reckon value, risk and vulnerability in an economy of desire.

Related: Evading Desire: Learning How to Not Want

Craft and Cinematography: How the Materialists Looks and Listens

Shabier Kirchner’s cinematography is a key collaborator in making Materialists feel like an observation rather than a lecture. Framing is often tight on faces, letting micro-expressions do the emotional work; interiors — Lucy’s office, Harry’s penthouse, John’s cramped rehearsal spaces — are lit and dressed to show contrasts between curated wealth and lived-in messiness.

Song and Kirchner favor calm, lingering coverage, allowing awkward silences to become their own punctuation. The camera will sometimes widen at a wedding reception or a party to show Lucy as a small figure processing a big, performative world. Editing by Keith Fraase paces the film toward intimacy rather than punchlines; the picture is comfortable letting scenes breathe, even if that occasionally makes the second act feel slightly diffuse.

On the sound side, Daniel Pemberton’s score and a handful of curated songs (including a Japanese Breakfast track) keep things contemporary without ever being intrusive. The music frames scenes the way a matchmaking memo might — crisp, explanatory and occasionally wistful — helping push the film’s emotional throughlines without owning them.

The mise-en-scène, from the angular modernist apartments to the battered theatre wings where John rehearses, does the heavy lifting of the film’s social commentary: New York isn’t only a backdrop, it’s part of the thesis.

Related: Wealth and Happiness: Does Money Make You Happy?

Character Performances: Johnson, Pascal, Evans — and the players around them

Dakota Johnson gives Lucy an exactness that’s easy to mistake for coolness. Her Lucy is articulate and efficient; Johnson leans into the character’s habit of abstraction (love as metrics) and then lets the cracks show. The real achievement is that Lucy is not written as a cartoon villain of #materialism — she’s a professional whose methods protect many people while failing others, and Johnson finds the moral nuance.

Chris Evans’s John is warm and slightly ragged, believable as the kind of enduring, affectionate person whose deficits are practical rather than moral. Pedro Pascal brings a particular kind of vulnerability to Harry that complicates the “rich guy” shorthand: he’s both dazzling and, in a late reveal, physically scarred for having pursued social capital through surgery.

Secondary performances, particularly Zoë Winters as Sophie, who is given an arc that includes trauma and resilience, anchor the film’s more difficult moments.

The “Math” Motif and What Materialists is Actually Critiquing

One of the cleverest devices in the screenplay is how often characters talk like accountants. Lines and scenes repeatedly return to arithmetic metaphors — “the math doesn’t add up,” “I’m doing the math,” “it’s just math” — as if to remind us that romantic calculus is already baked into modern dating practice. That phrase, which Lucy and other characters repeat, operates both as a defense mechanism and a diagnosis: a way of transforming subjective desire into objective criteria, and a way of hiding from feeling.

Critics have picked up on this motif as central to Song’s critique: the film is less a blanket condemnation of people who value stability or specific traits, and more an interrogation of when preference hardens into commodification.

But the movie refuses to settle into a single moral posture. It can be read as a critique of materialism — the world it depicts literally monetizes #romance (matchmaking is a product for sale) and reduces people to attributes — and as a bow to lost love: the ache for authenticity in Lucy’s relationship with John is as sincere and convincing as any scene where money is glamorized.

Song resists tidy allegories: money, height, and status are shown as both useful and corrosive. There’s also a sustained curiosity about how desire itself is conditioned; the film invites us to ask whether we choose partners for their material edge or because some deeper compatibility has been obscured by a culture that fetishizes metrics.

The Assault Subplot: Duty, Accountability, and The Limits of “Vetting”

Materialists forces a hard question into its plot: what responsibility do matchmakers (or apps, or friends who set people up) have for a client’s safety? The film includes a scene in which Sophie, one of Lucy’s clients, is assaulted on a date arranged through Adore. That sequence and the fallout are the film’s moral fulcrum.

Lucy’s boss frames the risk as an unfortunate hazard of the dating world; Lucy experiences it as a failure of care that becomes personal and existential. The film doesn’t give a legalistic how-to on liability; rather, it probes emotional accountability. Lucy’s crisis is not only professional (did her agency fail to vet properly?) but also ethical: can matchmaking be practiced like a neutral service when intimacy can become dangerous?

Song stages this subplot to complicate the narrative’s sweetness. Rather than use it as a melodramatic turning point, she treats it as a lived moment of social failure: institutions normalize risk, and individuals — however well-meaning — must contend with the consequences. This is where the movie most clearly leaves rom-com comfort behind and leans into social drama. The film’s questions — about vetting, power imbalances, and the difference between transactional matchmaking and relational care — are urgent precisely because they refuse a single answer.

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Harry, Leg-lengthening Surgery, and the Politics of Height

The film’s startling plot choice — Harry (and, apparently, his brother) having undergone leg-lengthening surgery to increase their heights — is the element most likely to be quoted at parties and memed on the internet. The procedure is presented matter-of-factly: scars show up under swim shorts; the reveal reframes Harry’s polish as achievement earned through pain.

In context, Song uses the story to show that desirability is not only purchased through wealth, but sometimes painfully engineered. The inclusion of a real-world cosmetic procedure with a growing (and ethically fraught) market gives the film an edge: it’s a literal embodiment of the lengths people will go to meet social standards of attractiveness.

That storyline does double duty. On one level it satirizes heightism and swipe-culture filters that reward tallness; on another it humanizes Harry, undercutting the easy opposition of “rich = monstrous” by showing how even the apparently privileged can be deeply insecure. The movie’s surprising generosity toward Harry complicates any simple “materialists are bad” reading: Song is as interested in the human cost of conformity as she is in condemning superficiality.

Matchmaking vs. Online Dating: Can Old Models of Finding Love Survive?

Part of Materialists’s pleasure is the ways it contrasts old-school matchmaking with algorithmic dating apps. Matchmaking in the film wears an almost artisanal veneer — curated lists, human negotiation, a promise of lifetime matches — but Song quickly undercuts the romance: Adore is still a business, with quotas, branding, and a culture of risk-management.

The #Materialists movie asks whether traditional matchmaking can be humane in an age where dating is quantified. The answer the film offers is ambivalent: human judgment can account for nuance that algorithms miss, but people are fallible, biased, and prone to market logic. The film also makes clear that matchmaking is not a neutral service; it shapes desire by presenting a particular set of acceptable tradeoffs.

Crucially, Song also addresses the illusions that apps create — that perfect matches are discoverable by scrolling, that attributes can be isolated and optimized — showing that both systems (the human and the algorithmic) reproduce cultural preferences about class, height, and family structure. The film implies that no matching system can escape the social norms that inform users’ filters; it can only choose whether to acknowledge that fact ethically or hide it behind glossy marketing.

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Are “6-foot, Rich, No Kids” Dating Preferences Realistic or Inherently Materialistic?

The movie intentionally provocates a thorny social question: when people insist on metrics (6-foot, wealthy, childless, never married), are they exercising legitimate standards or being shallowly materialistic? Materialists treats the demand for specific qualities as partly practical and partly symbolic.

Height and wealth are not merely attributes; they’re signals of safety, status and the future. Song deftly shows that such preferences can be both rational (economic security matters in a city with crushing rents) and ideological (a desire to display success, to keep social capital untainted).

From a moral standpoint, the film suggests that insisting on perfection is a defensive strategy — a way to minimize risk — but that it can also be a way of excluding complex, messy personhood. The narrative doesn’t argue that tallness or wealth disqualifies someone from being loving; rather, it asks whether those factors alone are sufficient to make a relationship sustain itself. The film’s answer is pragmatic: no. Money and height can change the conditions of a relationship, but they don’t do the relational work of mutual care, repair, and curiosity.

Song is careful not to moralize women (or men) who have preferences rooted in survival and social pressure — such as marriage pressure. Instead, she wants the audience to notice how cultural standards and economic realities conspire to make “deal-breakers” seem rational — and then asks us to interrogate whether the calculus is about love or about status. That ambivalence is one of the movie’s strengths.

Related: Marriage Pressure: Why Women Especially Feel Heavily Pressured to Get Married

Lucy’s Ethical Arc: Professionalism, Guilt, and Growth

Much of the film’s emotional force comes from Lucy’s self-examination. Early on she’s proud of her track record: nine marriages, a tidy résumé of success. But the assault of Sophie tears open a question Lucy can no longer quantify away: what is the duty of a matchmaker when the product is intimate, and intimacy can be harmful? Her struggle is not only with legal responsibility but with empathy — she must learn to feel without using metrics as armor.

Song writes Lucy as someone who can do the work of critique: she recognizes clients’ unrealistic demands and tries to help them see tradeoffs, but she also benefits from the same market she critiques.

The film’s best moments are when Lucy’s defenses drop — in small, private scenes where Johnson’s face does the storytelling. The arc ends not with absolution but with a modest, earned humility: Lucy is better, perhaps, at recognizing the personhood behind a profile. That’s a quietly radical payoff.

What Materialists Get Wrong (And for Whom It Might Not Land)

Materialists

is far from flawless. Some viewers have complained that the film’s second half loses momentum, that the marriage of social critique and intimate drama sometimes leaves both undercooked. The leg-lengthening beat risks feeling like a gimmick if you read it only as shock value; for others it functions as concrete evidence of the film’s thesis about violent conformity.

The assault subplot, while powerful, has provoked debate: is Song treating trauma with sufficient narrative care, or does the subplot exist primarily to catalyze Lucy’s growth? Reasonable viewers will disagree. The film’s pacing, and its refusal to give tidy moral payoffs, will make it feel unresolved to audiences who expect genre comfort.

Why The Materialists (2025) Movie Matters: The Film’s Cultural Significance

There are a handful of contemporary films that try to diagnose the emotional effects of late-capitalism on intimacy; Materialists is one of the more ambitious attempts. It’s not simply a morality play about rich vs. poor; it’s an inquiry into the structures (economic, social, technological) that teach us to appraise human beings like assets.

By centering a matchmaker — a profession dedicated to converting feeling into a sale — Song gives us a protagonist who literally incarnates the tension at the film’s heart. The movie’s courage is in probing uncomfortable questions rather than delivering comforting certainties.

For viewers who want a rom-com balm, Materialists might be too cool and self-aware; for those who want a picture that acknowledges how modern dating is shaped by money, measurement and risk, it’s a necessary conversation starter. Its mixture of dry humor, formal restraint and moral curiosity makes it feel like a film made by someone who trusts audiences to do some thinking in the dark.

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Our Rating: A Smart but Uneven Romance — 7.5/10

I’d give Materialists a 7.5 out of 10. It’s a film of sharp insights, finely tuned performances, and gorgeous cinematography, but it isn’t without unevenness. Celine Song’s refusal to give clean moral resolutions is admirable, yet the pacing drags in the middle act, and the collision of rom-com structure with heavier subplots (like Sophie’s assault) can feel tonally dissonant.

Still, Dakota Johnson anchors the film with a performance that makes Lucy’s professional armor and personal vulnerability equally believable, while Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans balance charm with pathos.

The film’s strength lies in its willingness to probe uncomfortable questions about modern dating, materialism, and the transactional ways we measure love, even if it sometimes wavers between satire and sincerity. It’s not perfect, but it lingers — and for a film about the mess of desire, that feels like the right kind of aftertaste.

Final Verdict (Recommendation and Who Should Watch The Materialists Movie)

Materialists is a subtle, occasionally exasperating work that rewards attention. It sits at the intersection of rom-com and social drama, and it will speak loudly to anyone interested in how dating culture has been redesigned by capitalism and technology. Dakota Johnson’s performance alone is worth the price of admission; Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans round out a triangle that is, if not revolutionary, emotionally messy and true.

If you want comfort cinema, this is not it. If you want a film that makes you think about why you ask for what you ask for, and what that says about safety, scarcity, and selfhood, then Materialists is one of the smarter movies of the year.

Watch the official trailer for Materialists (2025) below. Courtesy of A24.

Song has not made a definitive manifesto against materialism; she’s made a humane, searching film that recognizes the human costs of treating desire like a spreadsheet. That ambivalence — the refusal to condemn wholesale or to easily forgive — is what keeps the film alive after the credits.

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This article has been written with the help of A.I. for topic research and formulation.

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