- Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal
- August 13th 2025
- 117
- Celine Song
Dakota Johnson must choose between a wealthy businessman and her penniless ex-boyfriend in Celine Song’s latest.
Following the breakout success of her 2023 directorial debut, Past Lives, Celine Song is back with another romance drama, Materialists.
The film follows Lucy (Dakota Johnson), a high-end matchmaker working in New York City. One night, she attends the wedding of one of her clients and meets the groom’s older brother, wealthy businessman Harry (Pedro Pascal), and crosses paths with her ex-boyfriend John (Chris Evans), a penniless actor working as a waiter at the event.
Caught between them both, Lucy has to decide if she wants to pursue a romance with Harry or reconcile her relationship with John.
Harry can give Lucy the affluent lifestyle she covets, but her feelings for John are deeper and more genuine. Will Lucy go with her head and choose the lifestyle, or decide with her heart and choose love?
Materialists has been marketed as a romantic love triangle comedy, and that’s very misleading. There’s a love triangle and romance, but virtually no comedy. This is a complex drama that gets much darker than you might expect.
Like Past Lives, Song’s screenplay is filled with rich and juicy dialogue that feels very relatable. Her real-life experience as a matchmaker means her depiction of dating culture is spot-on, with Lucy’s customers setting their expectations too high, being too picky and listing their preferences based on numbers (age, weight, salary) instead of what the person is like.
However, some of Lucy’s choices didn’t ring true, and it was hard to reconcile her decisions with what we know about her character.
The casting didn’t feel 100% correct, either. Evans doesn’t convincingly look like a poor actor/waiter, but he plays the emotional side of the role well, so you can almost forgive that.
On the other side of the triangle, Pascal is very believable as the suave, rich man, but he doesn’t have much chemistry with Johnson, although they have some interesting conversations.
Johnson is well cast as the polished and in-control Lucy, but she doesn’t quite hit the emotional depth needed when the character becomes more vulnerable.
Materialists has a lot of good qualities – namely the script – but it’s definitely not a rom-com, and the main character’s decisions are frustrating and unconvincing.
In cinemas from Friday 15th August
By Hannah Wales.
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