Director Celine Song returns with her highly anticipated sophomore feature, Materialists, a sharp, modern take on romance rooted in New York City’s elite dating scene. Following her Oscar-nominated debut with Past Lives, Song shifts from quiet longing to a more incisive, but equally intimate, look at how the search for true love intersects with money and class.
The film stars Dakota Johnson as Lucy, a professional matchmaker whose career revolves around helping others find love based on compatibility metrics—sometimes as straightforward as income, age, and status. But when her personal life collides with her work, Lucy finds herself at the center of her own complicated love triangle, torn between Harry (Pedro Pascal), a wealthy private equity client who seems to check every box, and John (Chris Evans), her struggling actor ex who still knows her in a way few others do.
While Materialists carries the breezy energy of a classic rom-com, Song layers the story with a deeper examination of the transactional facets of modern dating. As she explained to ELLE, her time spent working as a real-life matchmaker while building her playwriting career exposed her to the unsettling ways people sometimes quantify love.
“While I was a matchmaker, I was asking my clients to describe their ideal partner and the answers were all numbers: height, weight, income, age… While I understood why they were asking for those things, I knew from being in love myself that that’s just not at all what love is about or feels like. So [making this] movie was about [striking] the balance between the practical and the fantasy of true love,” she said.
For Johnson, Lucy’s internal conflict lies at the heart of the film. “She’s at a very interesting time in her life where she’s sort of teetering between two worlds,” Johnson told Entertainment Weekly. “Allowing yourself to be loved is scary, and really loving another person is scary. It’s a story of bravery.”
Though the film nods to the feel of ‘90s romantic comedies, Song is clear that Materialists isn’t simply a lighthearted love triangle. “I would actually be more interested in it being talked about as a story of Lucy as she navigates not just the love and dating world in her clients’ lives, but also her own personal reality and beliefs about love,” she added.
One of the film’s most memorable moments comes early on, when Lucy casually orders a “Coke and beer” at a wedding—a strange combination that, as Song explained to GQ, reveals much about her character’s working-class roots and serves as a quiet signal of her history with John, who knows her well enough to bring her the drink without asking. “It speaks to Lucy’s character, about her background, and where she comes from,” Song said. “It’s meant to be a weird thing—which is why it’s so special that John knows her drink order.”
Is Materialists streaming yet?
Materialists opens in theaters on June 13. While A24 has not yet confirmed an exact streaming release date, the film is expected to eventually land on HBO Max, as part of A24’s ongoing streaming partnership with Warner Bros. Previous A24 titles like Priscilla and Babygirl have followed a similar release pattern.
For now, the film is exclusively available in theaters.
