“The things that are in Materialists came from the truth I learned: that there is a very funny, very dark objectification of each other’s humanity, and therefore a very real commodification of each other, as we go through this thing that we call dating,” says writer-director Celine Song. “But it’s supposed to be in pursuit of love.”
Celine Song drew inspiration for Materialists from her own past experience as a matchmaker in New York City. Before her success as a filmmaker, she worked in the matchmaking industry, where she observed how people approached love with a checklist of materialistic criteria—height, income, age, and even race. This experience gave her deep insight into human desires and relationships, which she knew she wanted to explore in a film.
In Materialists, Song channels these observations into the story of Lucy, a cynical matchmaker played by Dakota Johnson, who views dating as a financial transaction rather than an emotional connection. The film contrasts Lucy’s professional approach to matchmaking with her own personal struggles in love, as she finds herself torn between two suitors—one wealthy and stable, the other broke but deeply understanding. Unlike her previous film Past Lives, which focused on romantic destiny, Materialists delves into the economic pragmatism of modern relationships.
Materialists is a stirringly new, almost terrifyingly modern romance film: one that stealthily deconstructs the genre, only to put it all back together in its own image. Most romantic comedies and dramedies might have taught us to fall for the cookie-cutter sentimentality of love in the big city, while shows like Sex and the City attempted to unmask the merry-go-round of dating. But Song’s Materialists is perhaps the most subversive and true of them all for explicitly drawing a line between the two, and exposing the paradox of it all.
“It’s very specifically a movie about how to find love that lasts, that is going to lead to a partnership that’s forever — in the middle of the economy of dating,” Song says. “How are you going to survive?”
Call it love in the age of Raya, and in an era of relentless self-optimisation. If Song’s film is partially based on the hard truths of dating she was exposed to a decade ago, those superficial checklists have only become more extreme in a world where pursuing love now means endless profiles and swipes. Marriage may have always been a business partnership, but the accounting seems to have only become more stark.
“The math is never going to work when it comes to love, and the contradiction of that is what’s at the heart of the film,” Song says. “The film is meant to be about this impossible, contradictory, mysterious thing,” love itself.
Perhaps the most remarkable trick of Materialists rests in Song’s answer to the dissonance: amid its blistering observations about how we pursue love, the film refuses to be cynical, instead holding tight to our most tenderhearted beliefs around love and its mysteries.
“It’s part of Harry’s father’s speech at the wedding: It’s the last religion, the last country, the last surviving ideology,” Song says, referencing an early scene from the film. “Everybody has a belief about their love life. To me, that’s the most interesting conversation I’ve ever had about anything with anyone. If you want to get to know someone, ask them what their love life is like.”
A young, ambitious New York City matchmaker finds herself torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex.
While Song set out to make an honest movie about modern dating, her closest reference points were far more classical.
“The main references I had were Victorian romances,” she notes. “They’re more in touch with the practical realities of partnership and love than modern romances, because almost all Victorian romances are about class. The fantasy of Pride and Prejudice is that the love of your life is the same as the person who’s going to solve all your practical problems.”
Lucy is wise enough to recognize the fantasy for what it is, even if her clients can’t. It’s partly why she’s such a successful matchmaker. “She’s extremely nonjudgmental,” Dakota Johnson says of her character. “She just wants to deliver and she wants people to find love, but she’s pretty shut off from that search herself.”
“She’s somebody who’s very clear about the fact that love really does baffle her, but she’s very good at the math of dating,” Song adds. Lucy is someone who has clad herself in a kind of protective armour. “There are ways that she has basically made herself appear more valuable than she actually believes about herself,”
Song says. “I think that’s who she is: somebody who believes herself to be worthless and is showing up to every interaction she has with the world as the most valuable-looking version of herself as possible.”
She is, in other words, only responding to the real world, where dating increasingly has been hijacked by the logic and language of self-improvement, “which was supposed to be this internal Buddhist thing,” Song notes. “We turned it into something that is so corporate and so scary: I’ve got to invest in my body. I’ve got to invest in my mind. You’ve got to improve your value so that your value is high enough. Our thinking about love has become so steeped in that, that it’s hard to even escape.”
Materialists is perhaps most scathingly familiar to modern bachelors and bachelorettes for tapping into not only an exhaustion with this objectifying view of romantic partnership (ideas that are reinforced by the romance genre itself, Song notes) but also a deeply damaging sense of abstraction that reduces the people involved to a set of cold facts.
“It’s the constant dehumanisation that shouldn’t exist in your bedroom or on your date — that dehumanisation that we all deal with at work or in the world, we are having to do that in our intimate space,” Song says. That dehumanisation is what leads to a startling turn in the film, when Lucy’s success at her job is suddenly punctured by a frightening incident between two of her clients.
“The truth is there’s always a violent end to any kind of dehumanisation,” Song says. “There’s always going to be something that comes at the end of that. You’re never going to walk away from thorough dehumanising and thorough objectifying of another person without there being some very real consequences.”
The arc of the film, in one sense, follows Lucy’s struggle to walk away from this philosophy of dehumanisation, to realise “you’re not an asset—you’re a person,” Song says. “But that’s hard to imagine when the whole world is treating you like you’re an asset.”
It’s a corrosive way of thinking made plain when Lucy and Harry speak openly about what they can offer each other, going back and forth on what their worth is as investments for the other.
Lucy doesn’t see much in her own self-value, but “she’s seeing him as an asset, too,” Song says. “And through her eyes we see everything that he is, which is this very, very high-value person — the unicorn.” He’s pushed all the right buttons and gone to extreme lengths to optimise himself. But his superficiality is not something the film judges or caricatures, but in fact something that is entirely reasonable to someone like Lucy.
“Harry wants to be the most valuable version of himself, and he has a lot in common with Lucy on that level,” Song says. “They’re really clear about their own value, and they also be lieve in improving it, which is why I think Harry and Lucy respect each other so much.”
He also, crucially, offers exactly what Lucy says she wants: to marry rich. John, meanwhile, is utterly broke, stubbornly struggling, and determined to make his way as a theater actor.
“He is 37 years old and in a bit of a state of arrested development,” says Chris Evans. “He has roommates, lives a college lifestyle and is fine with it, at least on the surface. But he’s also very much in love with Lucy.”
In the math of dating, “he’s minus dollars,” Song says. But for all of Lucy’s brutally calculated approach to dating, she still knows that it’s different than love.
It’s far more inexplicable why when we see Lucy — a self-made woman, gleaming in her steely exterior — first run into John, all of that suddenly falls away and a deeper, perhaps truer part of her is rendered visible. Suddenly, we see a connection and his tory, something ineffable and beyond the calculations.
The Last Religion
Celine Song made Materialists for those who were curious about seeing dating and love for what it actually is — which is to say, everyone. One thing has always been consistent in Song’s experience talking to anybody ever.
“No matter where you are, who you are, how old you are, if I say I was a matchmaker, everybody lights up,” Song says. “It’s be cause love and dating is a mystery to everyone. And the first thing they say is, You need to help me. Help me talk about it, help me think about it. Can you help my friend with this?”
And yet, just as our attitudes and expectations (full of stubborn fixations and shallow materialism) around love are entirely at odds with what we hope love to be (blind, unconditional, and lifelong), we ignore the dissonance and trivialise the ideas that reinforce it.
“Some thing that I learned in matchmaking is just how deeply the way that love is depicted in media has completely corrupted all of our brains and our hearts,” Song says. “It completely forms the things that you believe about yourself and the things that you believe about who your partner should be for the rest of your life and what kind of erotic life you deserve.”
Materialists is the result of Song’s desire to seriously contend with our ideals. After all, if love is indeed our last religion, why shouldn’t we be anything but utterly honest about what love should be?
If Song’s film holds up a mirror to ourselves and to the phony cliches of the romance genre itself, it never comes to see love itself as a hollow pursuit. How could Song, who has had a front-row experience to people’s most unseemly desires and expectations around love, maintain that belief?
“Maybe this is all it is: It’s that I know it,” she says. “I believe it because I know it and I experienced it. And even if the love that I have ends, I’m always going to forever know now that love is possible. It exists, so how could I not believe?”
©2025 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
