In a city like New York, every choice can feel like a transaction, and love is no exception. Celine Song’s Materialists plants its flag firmly on this uncomfortable ground. We follow Lucy, a matchmaker for the city’s elite, who operates less like a cupid and more like a high-stakes systems analyst.
Her job is to pair wealthy clients by running the numbers—income, status, height—and her core philosophy is that a stable partnership is a well-executed equation, not a matter of unpredictable passion. She has designed a life built on this pragmatic principle.
Any good system, however, can be broken by unexpected inputs. For Lucy, they arrive in the form of two men. One is Harry, a wealthy “unicorn” who represents the logical endpoint of her entire philosophy, a perfect match on paper who is interested in her. The other is John, her ex-boyfriend, a broke but passionate artist who represents a past she deliberately left behind.
The film immediately establishes a choice not just between two men, but between two fundamentally different operating systems for a life. It forces her, and us, to confront a stark question: when you’ve built a career quantifying human connection, what happens when your own heart introduces a variable that defies calculation?
Dating as a Dialogue Tree
The film’s central “hub world” is the matchmaking agency, Adore, and it’s a masterclass in environmental storytelling. At first glance, the office is all feminine energy and celebratory bar carts. But stay a moment longer, and you see the truth: the desks are cramped and look ready to collapse, the bar cart itself is wobbly.
It’s a flawless visual metaphor for the precarious relationships the agency builds. Here, love is gamified. Clients are reduced to character sheets (“Peter C,” “Charlotte B”), and compatibility is a checklist of stats. A marriage isn’t a union; it’s a successful merger, the “quest completed” screen for a long campaign.
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Celine Song uses sharp, witty montages of client consultations that feel like watching a player navigate a series of dialogue trees with very specific win conditions. Much like a BioWare RPG, choosing the “right” options leads to romantic progression, while one wrong move can lock you out of a questline.
We see women who require a certain height attribute and men who will only accept partners under a specific level cap. Lucy is the master of this system. Her pronouncement to a client, “You’re not ugly, you just don’t have money,” isn’t just a line; it’s the game’s core mechanic revealed in plain sight.
She understands the rules better than anyone. This establishes a world governed by a brutal, clear logic. But it also makes you wonder about the emotional toll of a game where the primary objective is to market yourself as the ultimate prize.
Two Competing Questlines
Every great RPG presents the player with a critical choice, and for Lucy, the re-emergence of her ex-boyfriend John is like finding an old, abandoned questline suddenly active in her journal. John, played with a compelling weariness by Chris Evans, is the path not taken.
He is a struggling actor, and a flashback to a disastrous, cash-strapped anniversary dinner serves as the ‘failed mission’ log that explains why Lucy abandoned this route years ago. He represents a high-risk, high-reward emotional build—all passion, but with terrible loot.
In stark contrast is Harry, the main quest the game seems to be pushing Lucy toward. As played by Pedro Pascal, he is the ultimate “unicorn”—a wealthy, suave partner who lives in a penthouse that feels like a premium unlockable area. He even shares her transactional view of love, making him a systems-approved match.
There’s a telling moment where Lucy, in his apartment for the first time, seems more captivated by the real estate than the romance, like a player marveling at the high-resolution textures of a new zone.
This setup moves beyond a simple love triangle. It’s a conflict that reminds me of the Paragon/Renegade choices in Mass Effect. Harry is the logical, orderly Paragon path that promises stability. John is the chaotic, emotional Renegade path that threatens to upend the entire system.
Lucy’s struggle isn’t about picking a guy; it’s about choosing her character build. Does she stick with the pragmatic, optimized version of herself she has become, or does she respec and embrace the passionate, unpredictable person she left behind? The film poses a fascinating question about whether we are defined by the path we are currently on, or by the one we can never quite delete from our quest log.
Rendering Two Realities
Celine Song directs with the precision of a thoughtful game designer; nothing is left to chance. The sharp, naturalistic dialogue carries the narrative weight, avoiding clumsy exposition and instead letting the film’s ideas breathe. This confidence in the script allows the cinematography and sound to do some heavy lifting. The film essentially renders two entirely different versions of New York, each with its own visual and audio language, depending on which man Lucy is with.
Cinematographer Shabier Kirchner shoots scenes with Harry with a pristine, stable quality, like a polished pre-rendered cutscene. It’s a world of perfect lighting and expensive objects. By contrast, scenes with John feel like raw gameplay footage: the camera is roving and dynamic, capturing the grit and unpredictable ambient sounds of the city.
Daniel Pemberton’s gentle score acts as the main emotional soundtrack, but it’s the choice needle-drops—a technique used to great effect in another great anti-rom-com, The Worst Person in the World—that punctuate key moments.
It’s a design choice that recalls how different districts in a game like Cyberpunk 2077 have their own distinct aesthetic and soundscape. The craft is so effective at building these two separate worlds that you start to wonder if Lucy is choosing between two men, or simply deciding which reality she’d rather inhabit.
Breathing Life into the Code
A narrative structure this clear-cut lives or dies by its performances, and the trio at the heart of Materialists succeed by making their archetypes feel human. They take what could be simple character classes and give them complex, unpredictable inner lives.
Dakota Johnson anchors the film, moving beyond her usual on-screen persona with a sharp, forceful energy. Her cool, professional front is a perfectly calibrated defense mechanism, and the real art is in how she lets the cracks show, revealing the vulnerable, doubting person beneath the polished avatar.
This film also feels like a fantastic “character select” screen for its male leads. Chris Evans completely sheds his blockbuster skin, imbuing the struggling artist John with a tender exhaustion that feels painfully authentic. It’s the lingering love tangled with the bitterness of failure that makes him so resonant.
Meanwhile, Pedro Pascal ensures Harry is more than just a rich suitor with maxed-out stats. He brings a guarded, almost sad quality to the “unicorn,” hinting at his own unseen baggage. It’s the kind of subtle work that recalls the best performances in narrative games like The Last of Us, where the voice actors infuse every line with a history that isn’t explicitly scripted. Because these actors make their characters feel so real, Lucy’s choice stops being a theoretical exercise. It becomes a deeply human dilemma with no easy answer.
When the System Breaks
For much of the film, Lucy’s transactional world operates like a clean, well-designed game. Then, the system breaks. The subplot involving her client Sophie, who suffers a traumatic ordeal on a date Lucy arranged, is the critical failure that sends the whole machine haywire.
It’s a devastating narrative beat, reminiscent of the gut-punch moments in games like Spec Ops: The Line, where a player is suddenly forced to confront the horrific human cost of their in-game actions. Sophie’s accusation that Lucy is a “pimp” shatters the professional abstraction, revealing the ugly truth beneath.
The film smartly avoids a simple fairytale ending. Instead of a perfect score, it offers something quieter and more authentic. It suggests that finding genuine value in another person isn’t about mastering the existing game. It’s about recognizing that the game itself is rigged. The story leaves you with the idea that perhaps the only way to truly win is to stop playing by the established rules and start writing your own.
Full Credits
Director: Celine Song
Writers: Celine Song
Producers and Executive Producers: David Hinojosa, Christine Vachon, Pamela Koffler, Celine Song, Timo Argillander, Len Blavatnik, Taylor Shung, Danny Cohen, Andrea Scarso
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal, Zoë Winters, Marin Ireland, Dasha Nekrasova, Louisa Jacobson, Sawyer Spielberg, Eddie Cahill, Joseph Lee, John Magaro
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Shabier Kirchner
Editors: Keith Fraase
Composer: Daniel Pemberton
The Review
Materialists
Materialists brilliantly disguises a sharp, cynical drama as a glossy rom-com. Celine Song crafts a world where love is a system to be gamed, using thoughtful direction and a razor-sharp script to explore the transactional nature of modern relationships. Anchored by three fantastic, layered performances that breathe life into the code, the film is a deeply intelligent and emotionally resonant examination of how we quantify human value. It’s a stellar follow-up for Song that challenges its audience more than it comforts them, and is all the better for it.
PROS
- An intelligent script that smartly subverts romantic-comedy expectations.
- Layered, compelling performances from Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, and Pedro Pascal.
- Stylish and deliberate direction that uses cinematic language to enhance its themes.
- A thought-provoking and timely exploration of love, money, and self-worth.
CONS
- Pacing falters slightly with some predictable late-film plot resolutions.
- Its serious, analytical tone may alienate viewers seeking a light-hearted romance.
