In Materialists, Celine Song sets up what looks like a familiar situation: Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a New York-based matchmaker — working with a high‑end firm called Adore — who has an impeccable taste and an even sharper sense of control, finds herself entangled with two very different men: Harry, a wealthy, composed billionaire (Pedro Pascal), and John, her ex-boyfriend (Chris Evans), a caterer who still carries the texture of their past relationship. On the surface, it’s a classic romantic triangle: one man offering stability and status, the other tethered to memory, hunger, and unfinished emotional business. But Song isn’t really interested in the suspense of who Lucy will end up with. Instead, she zooms in on how intimacy feels in each case: what it stirs, what it conceals, what it demands.

The film opens with a bit of prehistoric roleplay — two cavemen giving each other gifts, flowers and tools — as if to remind us that this exchange, the trade of affection for safety or power or food, is ancient. But it’s only in our time that the exchange has been so thoroughly aestheticised, rebranded, gamified. And Lucy is a master player. Her silken rhetoric and measured voice mask a mind that literally treats love like a ledger, clients assigned numbers, heights, incomes, career titles as though tickers on Bloomberg. She has brokered nine marriages from her agency, which is marketed like a boutique investment fund, already. And the ticker of success keeps rising, but she remains an “eternal bachelorette” because Lucy herself is unavailable to the very calculus she champions, until Harry appears at a client’s wedding. 

He is tall, wealthy, a “unicorn.” He ticks all her criteria and yet when he’s genuinely interested in her she balks, used to being the broker not the bride. But before she fully rejects him, John, her ex, rumbles onto the scene working as a caterer at the same wedding, gasoline on the ember of a former love that died at the altar of poverty and unkept promises and squabbles over everyday demands of life. Suddenly, the film’s alchemy is set: Lucy’s caught between Harry, who offers her security, social currency, aesthetic ease, and John, who offers her something unquantifiable, real, and deeply remembered in her bones.

Her clients aren’t looking for soulmates. They’re looking for partners who can increase their social and economic net worth. Lucy knows this. She’s unbothered. She has absorbed it as law. But Lucy is not above the law she enforces. She lives in a beautiful apartment that belongs to someone else. She attends beautiful weddings she didn’t plan. She tells people what they want to hear, and she is rarely heard herself. It’s only when she meets Harry — soft-spoken, wealthy, generous in a tax-deductible sort of way — that her own ideas about relationships begin to fidget. He is, on paper, exactly what she should want. He owns art. He understands the value of stillness. And crucially, he isn’t put off by Lucy’s slightly detached manner, her polished edges. He likes her. Maybe even more than she likes herself.

John represents the version of Lucy that didn’t optimise for future value. He’s stubborn and emotionally direct in a way Harry could never be. He’s the reminder of a relationship that once survived on shared ramen, bad luck, and the kind of unresolved tension you only carry with someone when there’s rea; love. Lucy continues dating Harry. He buys her a $12 million apartment and cooks for her. He’s kind. But every time he touches her, something about her recoils. It’s not out of disgust, but her sense of dislocation. It’s as if she can’t find her reflection in the life he’s giving her. 

Song doesn’t rush Lucy into a choice. She lets her straddle the paradox. Harry is not a villain. He is offering exactly what he thinks will make her happy. But it’s not enough. Lucy’s work has trained her to see relationships like portfolios: things to be balanced, risk-managed, grown over time. But John doesn’t belong in that system. He is poor, unpredictable, but maddeningly sincere. He’s the reason Lucy has to start asking questions she’s tried hard to avoid: is security a substitute for intimacy? Can you build a life with someone just because you respect them? And what do we lose when we make love a form of upward mobility?

The real heartbreak of the film comes from the fact that Lucy has no easy of safe answer. Her own certainty begins to come undone. She gets snappy with clients. She flinches when Harry is kind. She goes to John’s apartment and doesn’t leave. And still, the film doesn’t treat this as a victory or a love-conquers-all moment. If anything, it feels more like a woman slowly admitting to herself that the future she was building was never going to include her as a full person. It was always going to require a version of her that was easier to love on paper.

Celine Song rewrites the rules of marriage by foregrounding its economic and existential dimensions. Materialists shows that modern marriage is a business deal, a contract. Song positions Lucy as someone who has learned its modern price: social value, financial safety, apparent perfection. The film presents love differently: as a gamble you make in full awareness of the odds. When love slips away from individual lustre and into communal choreography, it’s no longer about objects or status, but about mutual acceptance, about coming as you are, and letting your partner do the same. 

Materialists, thus, is not a story about finding the right person. It’s about learning to live with the consequences of what you want, and what you can’t live without. It's about how love now exists inside a culture that packages emotion for sale, and how choosing love, unadorned and unguaranteed, is not naïve but somewhat radical. By the end of the film, Lucy hasn’t rejected capitalism or started writing poetry or making ceramics. She is still herself. Sharp. Reserved. A little uneasy. But she’s also someone (spoiler alert!) who walked away from a luxury apartment, a diamond ring, and a trip to her dream destination, Iceland, because she wanted to be in a relationship that didn’t require her to disappear. That’s the real story of Materialists. Not romance or regret or rejection. Just a woman deciding that love, even when it’s uncertain, even when it’s small, even when it doesn’t accords you a higher social status — might still be worth it, if it lets you be whole, if it lets you feel wholesome.